Ramallah: Israeli police have opened an investigation into threats on social media against President Reuven Rivlin following his condemnation of “Jewish terrorism” after a firebombing killed a Palestinian child, a presidential spokesperson said on Monday.
Rivlin had written a Facebook post following Friday’s arson attack on a Palestinian family’s home in the West Bank village of Duma by suspected Jewish extremists.
The attack killed 18-month-old Ali Sa’ad Dawabsha and left his parents and four-year-old brother critically wounded.
“More than shame, I feel pain,” Rivlin wrote in Arabic and Hebrew. “The pain over the murder of a little baby. The pain over my people choosing the path of terrorism and losing their humanity.
“Their path is not the path of the state of Israel and is not the path of the Jewish people. Unfortunately, it seems that so far we’ve dealt with the phenomenon of Jewish terrorism limply,” he wrote, calling for concrete measures against such extremists.
Rivlin’s post evoked a wave of more than 2,000 comments, some positive but others attacking him and recalling Israelis killed by Palestinians.
“Dirty traitor. Your end will be worse than (Ariel) Sharon’s,” said one comment quoted by the Maariv newspaper, referring to the late former Israeli premier who spent eight years in a coma.
Another said: “In Russia you would have been found by this point cut up inside a shoe box.”
Israeli police said they had received material from the president’s security team and had ordered an investigation to “examine offensive publications against the president on social media.”
Israeli legal officials could not say whether incitement to violence was among the suspected crimes under investigation.
The past couple of months have witnessed a sharp rise in the terrorism by Israeli colonists in the West Bank and the occupied East Jerusalem.
Five Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military forces and colonists in the West Bank and the holy city, 23 houses and commercial establishments demolished, 200 Palestinians have suffered moderate and serious injuries, 1,400 trees have been uprooted in addition to a sharp increase in the number of attacks by colonists against Palestinian towns and villages of Area C of the West Bank.
Unprecedented escalation of conflict was also reported in Al Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem where the number of daily raids by Israeli colonists via Al Magerebah Gate has been the highest since the eastern part of the holy city was occupied by Israel in 1967.
Palestinian commentators believe that not only those who attacked the Al Dawabshah family in Doma should be tried at the International Criminal Court (ICC) but every colonist who lives beyond the Green Line should face this destiny. “This is an absolutely win case to the Palestinians and the delay to reach the ICC does not go in any way in favor of the Palestinian cause and people,” said Talal Okal, a political analyst.
In 1995, then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was gunned down at a peace rally in Tel Aviv by a Jewish extremist after a campaign of right-wing incitement against a peace deal with the Palestinians.
- with inputs from AFP
