PA leaders mourning assassinated Hezbollah terrorist Samir Kuntar in Ramallah. Photo: Elder of Ziyon.

A senior Israeli government official blasted the Palestinian Authority for honoring assassinated Hezbollah arch-terrorist Samir Kuntar in Ramallah on Tuesday.

“When leading members of the PA put a cold-blooded killer of children on a pedestal and portray him as a hero, they are demonstrating before the world that they have yet to exorcise terrorism from within,” the official told The Algemeiner on Wednesday evening, mere hours after a stabbing attack left two Israelis dead and another critically wounded. “We see this also in their justification for the ongoing terror attacks against Israeli civilians, which today alone exacted a heavy price.”

The official was responding to two ceremonies that took place in the PA, one attended by members of President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah faction, and the other actually held by the PLO Commission of Prisoner Affairs, the body established in 2014 to replace the PA Ministry of Prisoner Affairs.

Its director, Issa Qaraqe, spoke at the event and extolled Kuntar’s virtues, as pro-Israel blogger Elder of Ziyon reported.

“We meet today in the presence of the martyr Kuntar, to honor a martyr in the name of all the Palestinian people, and to assure him and anyone who fought for Palestine that they will stay present in all of our lives; we will not forget your sacrifices; we’ll proudly tell all the generations to come about you and how Kantar rubbed the occupier’s nose in dirt,” Qaraqe eulogized.

Qarage, as Elder of Ziyon pointed out, has testified before the UN about alleged Israeli crimes, including one claim about Israeli pharmaceutical companies performing medical experiments on Palestinian prisoners.

Kuntar, who was killed in an airstrike near Damascus on Saturday night and buried in Lebanon on Monday, spent 30 years in an Israeli prison for slaughtering a man and his four-year-old daughter in Nahariyah in 1979 – first shooting the father, then bashing in the little girl’s head with the butt of his rifle. (Meanwhile, her mother was hiding in a closet with the couple’s other child, a two-year-old, whom she tragically suffocated to death while hiding from Kuntar.)

Reports that Israel was behind the targeted killing of Kuntar — released in an Israel-Hezbollah prisoner swap in 2008 — have not been confirmed by Israeli military or government officials.