NOVANEWS
Times of Israel
Senior Fatah official Jibril Rajoub said it was a shame Sharon would never stand trial before an international tribune for his actions.
“Sharon was a criminal, responsible for the assassination of [Palestinian president Yasser] Arafat, and we would have hoped to see him appear before the International Criminal Court as a war criminal,” AFP quoted Rajoub saying.
PLO official Dr Mustafa Barghouti told the BBC that the Palestinians had no positive memories of Sharon.
“Nobody should celebrate any death. But unfortunately I have to say that Mr Sharon left no good memories with Palestinians. Unfortunately he had a path of war and aggression and a great failure in making peace with the Palestinian people,” he said.
Echoing Rajoub, Karl Sharro, a Lebanese blogger based in London, tweeted shortly after news of Sharon’s hit the press that the bottom line was that the Israeli general-turned-statesman would not stand trial.
Hamas, the Islamist terror group which took over the Gaza Strip in 2007, two years after Sharon unilaterally pulled Israeli troops and settlers from it, called Sharon’s death a “historic moment” that marked the “disappearance of a criminal whose hands were covered with Palestinian blood.”
A Twitter feed associated with the Islamist faction tweeted several messages bidding a farewell to “the butcher of Sabra and Shatila,” two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon where Christian Phalangist gunmen carried out a massacre in 1982.
Yousef Munayyer, executive director of The Palestine Center in Washington, DC, tweeted that Sharon’s legacy was “destruction, collective punishment and war crimes.”
Hussein Ibish, senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, wrote in a Foreign Affairs article shortly after Sharon’s death that, “For most Arabs, no Israeli in history is more synonymous with violence and Israeli expansionism than Ariel Sharon.”
“His name quickly conjures the worst massacres, deepest pro-settlement fanaticism, and most extreme nationalistic provocations in the Palestinian bill of particulars against Israel,” Ibish wrote.
The Palestinian Ma’an News Agency wrote in its obituary for Sharon that the one-time IDF chief of staff left behind “a bloody and conflicted legacy in the land he called home.”
“Nicknamed ‘the Bulldozer,’ Sharon is remembered by Palestinians and many other Arabs for his involvement in and leadership over massacres in several countries and his role in repressing the Palestinian national movement over the course of decades,” the paper wrote.
The official Wafa news agency was notably silent, providing no coverage of Sharon’s death Saturday in either English or Arabic.
In Iran, the English language PressTV ran a brief notice of Sharon’s death, noting that “Sharon was the prime minister of the Israeli regime from 2001 to 2006, and was directly responsible for war crimes against Palestinians and Lebanese.”
