Abbas’s Fatah Movement endorses the P.A.’s fatwa, or religious edict, prohibiting the transfer or selling of land to Israelis/Jews and encourages Palestinians not to violate it.
Fatah has announced that selling land to Israelis/Jews constitutes “high treason against the religion, the homeland, and the people.” Thereby, the movement repeats the P.A. mufti’s ban on selling land documented by Palestinian Media Watch. Fatah, which is supposedly a secular movement, also used religious language, warning that violating this prohibition would even have implications after death, in “the world to come.” “The Fatah Movement emphasized that the sale of properties and lands to the occupation or their illegal transfer to dubious sources constitutes high treason against the religion, the homeland, and the people, and that ‘whoever does this decrees upon himself shame and disgrace in this world and in the world to come.’ ” [Official P.A. daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Oct. 14, 2018]
A Fatah official went even further, stating that “the occupation’s contemptible agents” who sell or transfer land to Israelis/Jews are “bats of the night” and the opposite of those Palestinians “who are sacrificing their lives for Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque”:
“Fatah Revolutionary Council member and [Fatah] spokesman Osama Al-Qawasmi said: ‘There are those who are sacrificing their lives for Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and in order to defend its status and its Arabness, and on the other hand there are bats of the night—the occupation’s contemptible agents—who sell their conscience and their religion and betray Jerusalem for money, which will turn into a curse on their heads.’ ” [Official P.A. daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Oct. 14, 2018]
Earlier this month, the P.A.’s Fatwa Council again emphasized this prohibition on selling land to “the Israeli occupation,” also referred to as “the enemies,” and stressed that the land is considered “Islamic property”:
Read full report at PMW here.
