The Palestinian Authority has issued rare criticism of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei after he praised the October 7th massacre.
Speaking at an event in Tehran commemorating 35 years since the death of his former leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Republic said that “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood (the terrorist's name for October 7th) was exactly what the region needed. Our region needed this operation.
“This operation was a decisive blow to the Zionist regime,” he added.
According to Khamenei, the massacre foiled a multinational, US-backed plot aimed at enabling Israel to “dominate the politics and economy” of the Middle East.
“This scheme had reached its final moments. At such a critical moment, the Al-Aqsa Flood attack began and destroyed all the plans of the enemy,” he noted.
The Iranian leader added that the massacre set Israel “on a path that will end in nothing but decay and destruction.”
The office of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas condemned the comments, quoted by PA official news agency WAFA as saying that "the Palestinian people are paying the price of the Israeli war. They are the first to be affected by this war, which sheds their blood, and has resulted, since last October 7, in the killing of more than 36,000 Palestinians, wounding 83,000 others, the destruction of infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, mosques, and churches, displacing thousands of citizens, and exterminating hundreds of families."
The PA continued: "These statements, which clearly declare that their goal is to sacrifice Palestinian blood and thousands of children, women and the elderly, and to destroy Palestinian land, will not lead to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. The Palestinian people have been fighting and struggling for a hundred years, and they do not need wars that do not serve their ambitions for freedom and independence, and the preservation of Jerusalem and its Islamic and Christian sanctities.
“What we want is to end the occupation and embody our independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and not policies that do not serve the Palestinian national goals, which are represented by the liberation of Jerusalem and its sanctities, and destroy the Palestinian people and displace them from the land whose identity they have struggled to preserve, generation after generation,” the statement added.
The Presidency stressed that "we are in a continuous confrontation alone with Israel, and with successive US administrations that constantly use the veto to prevent Palestinians from obtaining their legitimate rights, and are trying to remove Jerusalem from the equation, provide weapons and money to maintain the Israeli occupation, and prevent the raising of the Palestinian flag over Jerusalem and the holy sites."
It should be noted that the Palestinian Authority and its Fatah leadership attempt to pass as a moderate faction, hoping to win American and Western support and to replace Hamas in Gaza. However, at the same time, Fatah's militant arm, the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, has been involved in terrorist activity both in the Gaza Strip and in Judea and Samaria.
This criticism of the Iranian Supreme Leader is similar to past statements by PA officials about October 7th, concentrating on the resulting war against Hamas and its consequences and mostly ignoring the mass murder and rape of civilians by the terrorists.