IDF General to Conduct Live Q&A with Palestinians on Facebook

“I want to be in direct communication with you and answer your questions,” IDF Maj. General Yoav Mordechai told Palestinians.

On Tuesday evening, 7:30 p.m. Israel time, IDF Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, head of Israel’s office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), will hold his first-ever live online chat in Arabic with Palestinian Arab residents of Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

The chat – a Q&A – will be conducted from COGAT’s Arabic-language Facebook page, Al-Munassiq (The Coordinator).

The Facebook page was launched eight months ago in order to engage directly with everyday Palestinians and to offer reliable information concerning Israeli policy. To date, it has over 76,000 followers, including Arabs from various locations in the Middle East.

“I want to be in direct communication with you and answer your questions,” Mordechai said in a video earlier this week.

Palestinian Civil Affairs Ministry spokesman Muhammad al-Maqadma told The Jerusalem Post that his ministry has no problem with the Facebook page.

“The Civil Affairs Ministry has no objection to the Israeli coordinator’s Facebook page,” he said. “The page expresses the coordinator’s opinions and goals. We do not believe that it constitutes an intervention into our internal affairs.”

Others, however, are more hostile towards Mordechai’s efforts.

Al-Majd al-Amani, for example, a news site closely affiliated with Hamas’s armed wing – Izzadin Kassam – authored a report on November 7, warning Palestinians against Mordechai’s page, according to the Post.

“Mordechai is one of the recruitment officers for a secret Zionist unit called 504,” the site stated, adding that the unit “recruits collaborators.”

By: World Israel News Staff