Doha, Qatar, July 18 – Unable to accept that the world cares about people other than Palestinians, officials of various Palestinian factions are accusing whoever shot down a jetliner over Ukraine yesterday of attempting to divert the world’s attention from Israel’s offensive on the Gaza Strip.
Leaders of both the Fatah and Hamas movements expressed suspicion this morning that the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over a separatist region of eastern Ukraine was calculated to push reports of Israeli military actions off the front page, as the number of casualties it claimed in a single blow was greater than the total number of all Palestinians killed since the start of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge eleven days ago. 295 people died in the crash; about 250 Palestinians have died from Israeli fire, at least half of them fighters.
The government in Kiev and pro-Russian rebels in the Donetsk region are blaming each other for the shooting, which has caused the suspension of all air traffic over that part of Europe and threatened to further inflame an already-tense situation. To Hamas leader Khaled Mashal, however, the timing of the incident raises suspicious questions.
“Who would believe that the world needs to pay attention to some far-flung place where people are fighting over a small strip of land?” he challenged. “Why would anyone care about threats to aircraft?” asked Mashal, whose organization has targeted Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport with several of its missile volleys. “People other than Palestinians can never claim genuine suffering, and therefore do not deserve such media coverage.”
PLO Chairman and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas shared Mashal’s suspicions. “We believe Israel engineered this crash to divert the world’s attention from its brutality against our people,” he told reporters and low-level foreign dignitaries who happened to remember that he ostensibly represents Palestinians. “It seems too convenient for another Malaysian Airlines flight to crash so soon after the first,” he added, referring to Flight 370, which disappeared over the Indian Ocean earlier this year. “Who is really going to believe that the same airline has been subject to this twice?” continued the leader of several militant factions who have repeatedly fired missiles at the same Israeli communities over the last week and a half.
Separatist leaders expressed surprise that Palestinians still exist. “Didn’t they kind of disappear after the Oslo agreements?” said one.
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