MIDDLE EAST: Israel and Palestinian officials are waging the latest round in an intifada propaganda war around the photograph of a baby Palestinian boy, dressed up as a suicide bomber, which was published yesterday in The Irish Times and around the world.
Israeli officials, who have long charged that the Palestinian education system encourages hostility to Israel, and highlights the ideology of martyrdom promulgated at kindergartens run by the Hamas extremist Islamic movement, said the picture underlined the incitement of even the youngest Palestinians to anti-Israeli aggression. The Palestinians were "feeding the hatred of Jews and Israelis to their children at the earliest possible age", said a spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon.
The Palestinian Authority, however, countered that the photograph was "cheap Israeli propaganda", being used, said the PA Information Minister, Mr Yasser Abed-Rabbo, "to justify Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people and to go on with their occupation of the Palestinian territories". Following two suicide bombings in Jerusalem last week, the Israeli army has recaptured all major West Bank cities in an open-ended re-invasion, and held hundreds of thousands of Palestinians under days of curfew.
Mr Ghassan Khatib, a PA cabinet minister and former public opinion analyst, said "60 percent of Palestinians" supported suicide-bombings. The youngest suicide bomber to date was aged 16. Several Palestinians in their early teens have been killed by Israeli troops in Gaza in recent weeks when attempting to infiltrate Jewish settlements there.
The Israeli army said that it found the photograph in a family album during house-to-house searches in southern Hebron some days ago. It shows a baby clad in an imitation explosive-packed belt, of the kind used by more than 70 Palestinian suicide bombers these past 21 months, and wearing the red headband of the Al-Qassam Brigades - the Hamas group responsible for numerous such bombings, including one on a bus in Jerusalem last week that killed 19 Israelis.
Mr Abed-Rabbo intimated that the photograph might be a forgery. But Sky News yesterday interviewed the family of the baby in the picture, who said he had been dressed up "just as a joke" by university students at a party six months ago, and that they did not know who had taken the picture. The army recently heavily shelled the family's flat; military sources alleged that one of those living there was orchestrating intifada violence.
The 21 months of intifada confrontation have been characterised by relentless media battling between the sides for world sympathy, in which powerful images have played a leading role. The Palestinians have highlighted chilling film and stills of an 11-year-old Palestinian boy, Mohammad al-Dura, shot dead as he cowered terrified by a wall in the Gaza Strip alongside his father, and hit, according to Palestinian officials, by Israeli gunfire, an assertion Israel was later to dispute. On the Israeli side, a potent still has been that of a Palestinian man in the first-floor window of Ramallah police station, holding out his bloody red palms for the cheering crowds outside to see, following the lynching there of two Israeli reservists.
In a speech last Monday, President George Bush called on the Palestinians to oust their existing leadership in elections, because of the PA's links to terrorism and failure to thwart the bombers. That call, furiously rejected by PA leaders, got a lukewarm response at the G8 summit in Canada, where a concluding statement noted agreement "on the urgency of reform of Palestinian institutions and of free and fair elections" but did not echo Mr Bush's demand for leadership change as a precondition for progress toward Palestinian statehood.
Israel's Foreign Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, appeared to undermine Mr Bush yesterday, by saying he would resume a peace dialogue with Mr Arafat if the Palestinian leader instituted genuine reforms.
Israeli complaints that Mr Arafat's anti-terror measures to date are superficial were reinforced yesterday when Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, spiritual leader of Hamas, attended a rally in Gaza despite supposedly being under PA house arrest.