On December 20, a Palestinian waited in a wooded area near a Jewish village in northern Israel in the hope of encountering a victim. Soon enough he spotted Esther Horgan walking home from an evening jog and killed her by beating her with a rock. He later told the police that he did the deed to avenge the death of Kamal Abu Wa’er, a terrorist in Israeli custody. Itamar Marcus explains:

Kamal Abu Wa’er, who was serving six life sentences for involvement in the murder of at least four Israelis, recently died of cancer in prison. Already during Abu Wa’er illness, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and [its ruling] Fatah party launched an incitement campaign, with top officials falsely claiming that Israel was denying him proper treatment; once Abu Wa’er had died, they intensified the libel that his death was caused by “deliberate medical neglect.” Apparently believing this to be true, the terrorist, Mohammad Kabha, decided to kill an Israeli in revenge.

The Palestinian Authority does everything it can to demonize Israel and create hate among Palestinians. One way of doing so is by spreading libels, and one of those libels is that Israel treats imprisoned Palestinian terrorists inhumanely. For years, the PA has purported that Israel “tortures” terrorist prisoners, gives them experimental drugs rather than try to cure their illnesses, does Nazi-like experiments on them, intentionally infects them with diseases, deliberately neglects them medically, and refrains from treating severe diseases like cancer to cause their “slow death.”

It must be stressed that the International Red Cross regularly visits the Palestinian terrorist prisoners and has never accused Israel of treating sick terrorist prisoners improperly. In June 2020 a Red Cross official told PA TV “we visited more than 90 percent of those who are in these [20 different] prisons.”

Indeed, Israel more than once provided Abu Wa’er with medical treatment in its own hospitals. Yet among the many who repeated this libel was the PA prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, who praised Abu Wa’er as “a fighter and a pure-hearted son of Palestine.”

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.