PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas
PA chairman Mahmoud AbbasReuters

The West claims that Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Mahmoud Abbas is a “peace partner” for Israel, even as his Fatah party continues to encourage terrorist attacks against Israelis.

On Thursday, representatives of Abbas’s Fatah movement met in Beirut with representatives of Hamas, headed by Khaled Mashaal, to discuss ways to expand the wave of terrorism, which they call an "intifada" against Israel.

According to a report on Hamas’s website, the two sides agreed on the need to thwart "the Israeli plan" allow religious Jews to worship on the Temple Mount, to bring an end to the "occupation", dismantle the Israeli "settlements" and protect the holy places, headed by Jerusalem.

The report further said that the sides also agreed to coordinate the work of the Palestinian Arab factions in the struggle against Israel and in promoting the implementation of the national reconciliation plan.

The Hamas delegation was headed by Mousa Abu Marzouk and the Fatah delegation was headed by Azzam al-Ahmed, a member of the group’s central committee.

The Fatah movement has been behind much of the incitement to terrorism against Israel, most recently in the form of an extensive campaign glorifying stabbing attacks against Jews.

While Fatah often openly glorifies the Arab terrorists conducting lethal attacks on Jews, the PA has shown a different tactic, instead claiming that Israel invents the attacks to justify "executing" what they dub "innocent" Palestinian Arabs, and then plants knives at the scene to frame them.

Abbas himself recently claimed in a speech that Israel “executed” 13-year-old Ahmed Mansara, a terrorist who stabbed and seriously wounded two Jews in Pisgat Ze’ev.

Mansara was, in fact, very much alive, and was at the time in police custody at an Israeli hospital, having been injured in the course of carrying out the vicious knife attack.

Israeli officials - including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's office - immediately slammed the comments as "lies" and "incitement", resulting in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) rewriting Abbas’s speech only to get the facts wrong yet again.