Video - Fatah Militants in Gaza Display "Booty" from Israeli Army and Vow to Kidnap Soldiers

The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the armed wing of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party, gave exclusive footage to Lebanon’s pan-Arab satellite broadcaster Mayadeen TV to show off weapons it claimed to have taken during clashes in Gaza from an elite unit of the Israel Defense Forces, along with locally-manufactured rockets.
In the segment, an Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades leader vowed to continue the “armed struggle - kidnapping soldiers, striking the enemy, and martyrdom operations” and use the missiles “to attack Zionist armed vehicles.”
The report could embarrass and weaken Abbas at a time when international mediators are trying to raise his status as the potential peace keeper for Gaza, although his inability or lack of interest to disarm Fatah’s own Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades raises more questions about his own desires for living peacefully with Israel.
“The only effective course of action against the enemy is armed struggle - kidnapping soldiers, striking the enemy, and martyrdom operations, ” an Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades leader said in the footage translated by MEMRI and flagged on Wednesday by blogger Elder of Ziyon.

 “We in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades promise you that we are preparing a high-profile attack against the Zionist enemy: kidnapping Zionist soldiers and imprisoning them, in order to empty the Zionist prisons of our commanders and comrades held there.”

As solutions to the conflict in Gaza point towards Fatah, in the West Bank, rising above the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad factions, in Gaza, blogger Elder of Ziyon called out the hypocrisy of the party, and Abbas, in particular, for never renouncing the violence or clamping down on its own armed wing.

“Not once has Abbas denounced the terrorist groups that operate under his own party,” the blogger said. “This is one of the biggest unreported stories of the war - the Israelis don’t want to mention it because they are cooperating with the PA on security and don’t want to embarrass Abbas, and the media stays away from the topic because it contradicts their meme of Abbas being a man of peace.”
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