Free Republic

The Palestine Scholars Association, a radical Islamic body in the Palestinian territories, issued a fatwa on Wednesday banning foreign Muslims from visiting the Temple Mount as long as Jerusalem is under Israeli control. Dr. Maher al-Huli, head of the fatwa department in the PSA, said that non-Palestinian Muslims should refrain from visiting the Al-Aksa Mosque “while it remains captive by the state of the Jews.” He said in a fatwa that Muslims were instead entrusted by God with “liberating and saving the mosque from the Jewish usurpers and restoring it to the glory of Muslims.” The fatwa came in response...

A group belonging to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party announced on Monday that it had recruited Palestinian women to launch suicide attacks against Israel. A woman who identified herself as Um al-Abed told reporters in Gaza City that so far about 100 women had expressed their desire to carry out suicide attacks against Israel. She claimed that she was a spokeswoman for the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of Fatah. The Aksa Martyrs Brigades, she added, recently established a secret military unit for female suicide bombers from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem. "We have so...

Palestinian Authority officials on Saturday expressed deep concern over the growing state of anarchy and lawlessness in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, warning that the PA was rapidly losing control. Some Palestinians compared the situation to what's happening in Somalia, which is divided by fiefdoms run by clan leaders and warlords. "The situation in the Palestinian territories is very dangerous because we are no longer in control," a senior PA official here admitted. He said the latest cycle of internal violence, including the kidnapping of foreigners, attacks on public buildings and installations, and gun battles between rival gangs and...

This is the first in a series on Palestinian life four years into the intifada. It's not so much what Zakariya Zubeidi, the fugitive leader of the West Bank Aksa Martyrs Brigades, says, but how he says it. Zubeidi speaks in the vacant tones of a ghost. And four years after he first picked up a rifle, this peace-activist-turned-local-hero-and-killer eulogized the Palestinian intifada in words similar to those in which he described himself. "The intifada is in its death throes. These are the final stages – this I can confirm," he said on Wednesday. He held court in a safe...

After months of deliberation, the United States yesterday announced it has moved to add the Aksa Martyrs' Brigades, a terrorist group linked to Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, to the State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). The Aksa Brigades was responsible for yesterday's suicide bombing in Jerusalem and for dozens of other terrorist attacks. The FTO designation makes it illegal for Americans to provide funds or material support to the group, and requires US banks to freeze all funds held in its name. Members of the group can also be denied entrance to the US. Secretary...

LONDON (March 25) - The suicide bombers of the Aksa Martyrs' Brigade are educated, middle-class, and led by a second-year university student in international relations, according to Lebanese Muslim writer Hala Jaber, who recently spent four days with the group. In an article published in the London Sunday Times yesterday, Jaber, author of a book on Hizbullah, provided a unique insight into the profile, recruitment, and mind-set of the killers. She described traveling to Gaza, where she was blindfolded and driven for 20 minutes to a secret location for her meeting with brigade leader Abu Fatah and a group of...