Jibril Rajoub, a very prominent member of Fatah's Central Committee who also serves as the chairman of the Palestinian Olympic Committee and head of the Palestinian Football Association, recently made the following statements, broadcast on an official Palestinian Authority TV station, including incitement to violence (praise for abducting an Israeli soldier) and an antisemitic comment (comparing Israel to the Nazis).

To mark the founding of Fatah, Jibril Rajoub, a member of Fatah's Central Committee, viciously attacked Israel in a number of interviews. On December 31, 2013, he was a guest of official Palestinian TV's open studio. He said he hoped that the 50th year of the Fatah movement would be the year in which Palestinian sovereignty would be instituted over the state of Palestine and the [Israeli] occupation would be uprooted. The occupation, he said, was a "cancer" threatening to destabilize the entire region. As for the negotiations with Israel, he claimed that it was clear that there was not even a glimmer of hope that peace could be had with "the Fascist occupation... an ugly model of Nazism" (Official Palestinian TV, January 2, 2014).

Interviewed on another occasion, Jibril Rajoub called for the escalation of the so-called popular resistance. Asked about the news item in the Israeli daily paper Yedioth Aharonot stating that Hamas was planning to abduct Israeli soldiers, he said "Let them abduct [soldiers]... I think the Israelis need to understand that abduction is a clear example, it is the language they understand. We encouraged [Hamas] and when they abducted [Gilad] Shalit we blessed and praised them, and when the Shalit prisoner exchange deal succeeded, despite the fact that we had our doubts, we still blessed and praised them."

[Source: ITIC, Jan 8, 2014]