UN Accredited Palestinian Group Celebrated Kidnapping of Israeli Teens
by Shiryn Ghermezian
PRC Chief Tarek Hamoud threatened PA President Mahmoud Abbas with “punishment.” Photo: UN Watch.
A Hamas-linked, London-based Palestinian group which was approved for accreditation on Monday by the United Nations celebrated the terror group’s kidnapping of three Israeli teens last summer, NGO UN Watch reported.
At the time, the Palestinian Return Center (PRC) posted on Twitter a series of messages promoting terrorism and violence. The group quickly deleted the tweets after UN Watch published its report, which included screenshots of the tweets.
On July 14, 2014, two days after the Hamas kidnapping of the teens, PRC Executive Director Tarek Hamoud tweeted the three fingers symbol used to cheer the abduction of the boys, who were later discovered to have been murdered soon after their capture.
In a separate post, which has also since been deleted, Hamoud threatened Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas with “punishment.”
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Abbas was featured alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in a graphic posted by Hamoud. The image was captioned: “Grim, humiliated faces agreeing to hate #Gaza and fight it. The faces are different but the crime is one, and the punishment will be the same #Gaza_wins.”
After deleting the posts, Hamoud locked his Twitter account.
The PRC also cheered Hamas’ rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, according to UN Watch. Additionally, PRC Chairman Majed Al-Zeer posted an antisemitic photo on Facebook in February but deleted the image on Monday after it was spotlighted by the watchdog group.
On its website, PRC describes itself as an independent consultancy focused on helping Palestinian refugees and their “internationally recognized legal right to return.” The group announced on Friday that it had initiated a lawsuit against Israel’s United Nations mission for alleged defamation after the Jewish state noted that the organization had links to Hamas and “openly promotes terrorism.”
On Twitter, PRC claimed that it is “not affiliated with any Palestinian party, including Hamas.”
