PLO Director of the Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs Issa Karake called on Palestinians to prepare themselves for armed conflict against Israel, encouraging them three times in one article: “Look for a gun and bullets.”
The article, which he published on the PLO’s Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs’ website as well as in the Palestinian daily Al-Quds, accused Israel of deliberately trying to murder Palestinian prisoners and therefore “there is no need for journalism, media, analyses, and speculations… Break the pens, look for a gun and bullets. Do not look at your watches, the time is up.”
Karake wrote this one day before the Palestinian prisoners ended their 40-day hunger strike, and he argued that Israel was not giving in to the hunger strikers demands so that the Palestinian prisoners would starve to death.
“They (i.e., the prisoners) are being murdered [by Israel] in silence, through an official and planned method. They are melting, bleeding, and dissipating. If one prisoner will fall, the entire world will fall. The world will die if a Palestinian prisoner will die…Do not make us receive bodies from the occupation’s prisons. There’s nothing left to say, and there is no need for journalism, media, analyses, and speculations. … The prisoners are currently struggling for their lives. Break the pens, look for a gun and bullets. Do not look at your watches, the time is up…”[Website of the PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs, May 24, 2017
and Al-Quds, May 25, 2017]
Karake repeated the call to prepare for violence twice more in the article using the same words: “Enough, let every one of us look for a gun and bullets.”
by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik
