By Ryan Jones
Feb 21, 2006
Amid the rise to power of a bona fide terrorist organization that is still recognized as such, coverage of events in the Palestinian Authority of late has shifted away from the less-than-sanitary activities of Mahmoud Abbas' own Fatah faction.
But a key arrest by Israeli security forces earlier this month has brought Abbas' boys back into the terrorism limelight, proving that whether it?s Hamas or Fatah holding the reins, the PA is a terrorist entity and enemy of the Jewish state.
Ynet reported Monday that on February 3, a joint raid by IDF troops and Israel Security Agency agents netted a five-man Bethlehem-based Fatah terror cell and the eight mortar shells they had planned to fire into southern Jerusalem within days of their arrest.
ISA chief Yuval Diskin told his Knesset overseers Monday that the discovery marked the first time known to Israeli officials that a ballistic weapon had been aimed at the capital.
Also of interest was Diskin's revelation, according to sources present at the briefing, that several members of the cell were PA employees in Bethlehem, and that the cell's leader, a Jaber Achras, worked at the PA's Muqata headquarters in Ramallah.
Achras was also involved in several other terrorist attacks, including the killing of two IDF soldiers at a military checkpoint in Samaria in 2003.
So much for claims that anti-Israel terrorism is carried out by rogue groups over which Abbas and his regime are able to exert little influence.