Senior Palestinian Official: Bennett is a Nazi Like Goebbels Who Ordered the Killing of Al Jazeera Reporter

Palestinian Rajoub
AP/Steffen Schmidt
Deborah Brand

Senior Palestinian official Jibril Rajoub called Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett a “Nazi, like Goebbels,” and accused the Israeli premier of “giving the order” to kill Al-Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh in an interview with the network.

“The prime minister – that Goebbels, that Nazi, that fascist – said yesterday: ‘Abu Mazen wants to tarnish our image, and I stand behind my soldiers,'” Rajoub told Al Jazeera, referring to Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas by his moniker.

“He gave the order (to kill Abu Akleh). He bears the responsibility,” Rajoub, who serves as the central committee secretary of Abbas’ ruling Fatah faction, went on.

He drew comparisons to the war in Ukraine and referred to Russian claims of fighting neo-Nazis.

“What is happening in Ukraine – you see how they [Russia] deal with it, while here, we have neo-Nazis who do those things,” he said.

Rajoub has in the past compared the Israeli government’s actions with the Holocaust. In 2019 he charged that the “goal” of the Israeli government was to “remind us of the Holocaust and Auschwitz.”

“In every city in Palestine, from Rafah to Jenin, there is an Israeli Auschwitz for the massacre of Palestinians,” he said.

Rajoub, a former security chief widely considered to be a possible successor to Abbas, has been charged with incitement to terror and has served time in Israeli jails.

In 2017, Rajoub received a court summons and compensation lawsuit for $250 million upon landing at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York over his alleged involvement in the killing of an American-Palestinian citizen in 1995.

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