Enlarging the jihad arena. “Palestinian militants threaten to attack Jews abroad,” from Reuters, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:
GAZA, April 17 (Reuters) – Palestinian militants linked to President Mahmoud Abbas’s increasingly fractured Fatah movement threatened on Monday to attack Jews overseas to force Israel to release Palestinian prisoners from its jails.
Two other main Palestinian militant groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, also said they supported violence to free more than 8,000 prisoners held by the Jewish state, but neither explicitly backed attacks on Jews outside Israel.
The call by militants of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades could heighten tension between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which has been crippled financially by the loss of Western aid, and of tax and customs revenues frozen by Israel, after Hamas’s crushing electoral win over Fatah in January. “This is an open call to all our fighters in the homeland to focus on kidnapping Israeli soldiers and civilians inside our occupied land. And if the enemy does not release our prisoners, then Zionists outside Palestine will be an easy target for our fighters,” the group said in a statement.
The threat was made shortly before a Palestinian suicide bomber killed himself and six other people at a sandwich stand in Tel Aviv, an attack claimed by both Islamic Jihad and al-Aqsa.