The Islamic Jihad Movement on Wednesday lashed out at the PA president, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), for condemning Sunday's shooting attack by Palestinians on a number of Israeli settlers in a junction south to the West Bank city of Bethlehem, which resulted in the death of three settlers while five others were injured. 
"Such a condemnation represents a dangerous retrogression in the PA's official stance being the first of its kind that criticized the resistance attacks on the Israeli occupiers in Palestinian lands occupied in 1967," a source in the Movement said in statement Wednesday.
"The danger of such a denouncement lies in the fact that it might herald legitimacy for what the Zionists and Americans call as settlement blocs and outposts in the West Bank, including Kfar Etzion, which the offensive took place at its entrance," he added.
According to PIC, he urged the PA to "stand by the resistance option and to stop wooing the Israeli occupiers who would be only content with a Palestinian internal civil war".
© 2005 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
