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PA daily columnist: Israeli soldiers ‎followed Ziad Abu Ein’s “every move in ‎order to kill him"

Op-ed by Yahya Rabah, columnist for the ‎official PA daily and a member of the ‎Fatah Leadership Committee in Gaza
‎“The last time I saw the national Fatah ‎leader Ziad Abu Ein was on Sunday, the ‎‎7th of this month [December 2014], during ‎a ceremony held at the Mahmoud Darwish ‎Center, at which the extraordinary writer ‎Ahmad Ghneim presented his book, ‎Sheikh Rihan – Jerusalem Stories. Ziad ‎reminded me of the Palestinian poems I ‎had written during the first Intifada (i.e., ‎the first Palestinian wave of violence ‎against Israel, 1988-1993). I promised him ‎I would return to my poems, but I did not ‎know the occupation soldiers were ‎lurking Ziad Abu Ein’s every move in ‎order to kill him. He resisted their terror in ‎‎[the West Bank town of] Turmus Ayya, and ‎disproved their false memories through a ‎brilliant plan of action: by planting olive ‎trees in the crevices of the cliffs of our ‎eternal Palestinian hills, so that our ‎Palestinian narrative blossoms, while the ‎false Zionist narrative recedes and is ‎disproven.”‎

Note: Ziad Abu Ein - Fatah Revolutionary Council member and head of the PA Committee to Resist Settlements and the Wall. Abu Ein died on Dec. 10, 2014 at ‎a demonstration in the West Bank that ‎turned violent. Immediately following his ‎death, PA and Fatah leaders claimed that ‎Abu Ein was murdered. Footage from the ‎event shows Abu Ein in an altercation with ‎an Israeli soldier who grabbed Abu Ein by ‎the neck, and later shows Abu Ein on the ground clutching his chest in pain. The ‎autopsy, which was overseen by Israeli and ‎Palestinian pathologists, revealed that the ‎cause of death was a heart attack, but ‎disagreement remains over the extent to which the altercation with Israeli forces may have caused ‎the heart attack. Palestinians have ‎continued to describe Abu Ein's death as a ‎‎"murder" and "assassination" by Israel.‎

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