In a live interview on Al Jazeera, senior Fatah official Jibril Rajoub called Prime Minister Naftali Bennett a “Nazi” like “Goebbels”, accusing him of giving the “order” to kill Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, who died last week during a fire exchange in Jenin.
"[Bennett] - that Goebbels, that Nazi, that fascist - said yesterday: ‘[PA President Mahmoud Abbas] wants to tarnish our image, and I stand behind my soldiers.’ He gave the order [to kill Abu Akleh]. He bears the responsibility,” Rajoub, the secretary of the Fatah Central Committee, told Al Jazeera, likening the Israeli premier to the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party Joseph Goebbels.
Additionally, he compared the war in Ukraine to the death of the reporter by indirectly referring to Russia’s claims of fighting neo-Nazis in Ukraine: “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.
It is not the first time that Rajoub drew a comparison between the actions of the Israeli government and the Holocaust. In 2019, he claimed 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 then.
Israel, for its part, requested Washington's assistance in persuading the Palestinian Authority to agree to a joint investigation into Abu Akleh's killing after Israeli officials voiced concern to their American counterparts that the Palestinians would destroy evidence that may show the reporter was killed by Palestinian militant gunfire.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said he expected the PA to refrain from contaminating forensic evidence and disrupting a transparent search for the truth: "The PA is preventing any possibility to jointly investigate the death and refuses even to grant access to the critical forensic evidence needed in order to arrive at the truth," Bennett said.