PALESTINIANS DEMAND INVESTIGATION OF CHILD'S DEATH EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE
ARRESTED MUSLIM PILGRIM WHO SHOT HER
BY MICHAEL WIDLANSKI (UPDATED to Wednesday, 02 February, 2005)
Palestinian broadcasters began their news programs Wednesday with the
demand that there be an investigation of the death Monday of Nouran Deeb, a
ten-year-old Gaza school girl, and Palestinian officials have not tried to
dispel the impression-that they themselves promoted-that Israeli forces
deliberately murdered the girl.
The demand for an investigation came even though Israeli officials say
the Palestinians have admitted privately that they know Israeli forces had
no connection with the girl's death and that she was accidentally shot by a
Palestinian.
Israeli officials and reporters said the Palestinian Authority arrested
and then released a Palestinian Muslim pilgrim returning from Mecca who
fired celebratory shots in the air that apparently killed the ten-year-old
girl.
"Former Interior Minister Muhammad Dahlan demanded a joint
Palestinian-Israeli investigation of the killing of Nouran Deeb who was
killed by Israeli occupiers as she stood in the courtyard of her school in
Rafah," asserted Hayat al-Jadeeda in a front page story today.
Al Hayat al-Jadeeda is a daily newspaper closely identified and
subsidized by the Fatah movement headed by Mahmoud Abbas, the chairman of
the PLO and the newly elected president of the Palestinian Authority.
It was the second day in a row that the news of the girl's death
dominated the Palestinian media.
"The occupation burns up the calm by killing a girl in her school yard in
Rafah," declared Al-Ayyam, another Fatah paper closely aligned to Abbas and
the PLO leadership.
The headline Tuesday appeared under a top-of-the-front-page picture of
the girl's desk with a flower atop it and an empty school uniform on her
chair. (The same picture appeared on page 3 of Tuesday's Hebrew daily, Ha'aretz.)
Palestinian officials such as Prime Minister Ahmad Qreia and Negotiations
Minister Saeb Arikat called the death an Israeli war crime..
"A child was martyred and another was wounded when they were both struck
by bullets of the Israeli occupiers as the two of them stood in the
courtyard of their school in Rafah in southern Gaza," declared the Jerusalem
daily newspaper Al-Quds Tuesday in an account that paralleled the other
Palestinian media outlets.
The demands for an investigation come at a time that the Palestinian
Authority under new president Mahmoud Abbas has actually increased certain
elements of incitement, regularly referring to attacks on Israelis as
"resistance operations"-a term that was not widely used during the tenure of
Yasser Arafat.
The demands for investigations of Israeli "cruelty" come amid daily
inflammatory references to the Israeli government which is now regularly
called "The Tel Aviv government," and to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
as "the Tel Aviv prime minister."
The Palestinian state radio (Sawt Felasteen: Voice of Palestine) and
Palestinian State Television and its satellite service (PBC-Palestinian
Broadcasting Corporation) made no mention of new developments in case of
Nouran Dheeb's death, which has been promoted as another "atrocity" or "war
crime" committed by Israel.
Israeli State Television and Radio reported Tuesday night and Wednesday
morning that the Palestinian Authority had arrested a Gaza man who was part
of a party of Muslim pilgrims who fired off the their weapons in celebration
of their return from the "Haj" in Mecca, one of the five basic commandments
of Islam.
Late Tuesday night, Palestinian Broadcasters continued accusing Israel of
killing the school girl and wounding another, with tank fire, even though
it was clear to them that there was no tank fire in the area at the time of
the incident, and even though the nearest Israeli position was almost 1,000
yards away-making a fatal shot from an M-16 bullet a near impossibility.
"Israel continued its attacks against our people today that began with
the killing of Noran Deeb yesterday," asserted senior Voice of Palestine
anchorman Nizar al-Ghul during the daily evening news round-up (9PM
Jerusalem, 2PM NY).
The Palestinian charges of Israeli murder of the young school girl have
been repeated many times on the air by Palestinian officials and were seized
upon by the HAMAS organization which has fired more than a dozen mortar and
missile rounds at Israeli communities inside Gaza over the last few days.
The employment of charges of atrocities-especially the murder of
children-has been a mainstay of the Palestinian Authority's "information"
specialists who built hours of inflammatory programs and songs around the
death of Muhammad Doura, an eleven-year old killed in Gaza.
Doura, who was filmed apparently dying in his father's arms, became a
kind of poster boy for "Intifadat al-Aqsa"-the Al-Aqsa Intifada, the name
Palestinians have given to the four-year-long war against Israel launched
after Ariel Sharon was accused of defiling Islamic holy places in Jerusalem
in September 2000.
Four years and several thousand deaths later, French camera crews
(France-Deux) have now all but acknowledged that they manipulated films of
Doura's death, and it seems likely that the boy in Gaza then-like Noura
Dheeb now-was killed by Palestinian bullets.
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Dr. Michael Widlanski teaches political communication at the Rothberg School
of the Hebrew University.
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