Mustafa Barghouti, general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, falsely claimed on Piers Morgan Uncensored that all the remaining captives held by Hamas in Gaza are IDF soldiers and should be classified as prisoners of war.

“Why don’t Hamas just release the hostages?”

Piers Morgan asks General Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative Mustafa Barghouti.

https://t.co/rnOpUsDStb@piersmorgan | @MustafaBarghou1 pic.twitter.com/r8SI2kDRa6

— Piers Morgan Uncensored (@PiersUncensored) May 28, 2025

The post WATCH: Senior Palestinian official claims all remaining hostages are IDF soldiers appeared first on World Israel News.

Palestinian officials are hoping the anti-Israel report will lead to prosecution of the Jewish state at the International Criminal Court.

By World Israel News Staff

The Palestinian Authority and anti-Israel groups are praising the Amnesty International report released yesterday that accuses Israel of practising apartheid.

“The State of Palestine welcomes the report by Amnesty International on Israel’s apartheid regime and racist policies and practices against the Palestinian people,” the PA Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement, The Jerusalem Post reported.

“Amnesty International joins a long list of distinguished Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights organizations and experts in exposing Israel’s colonial occupation for what it is: an institutionalized system of oppression and domination over the Palestinian people, designed to legitimize its colonial settlement expansion, deny the Palestinian people their inalienable right to self-determination, and erase Palestinian history, present, and future in their homeland,” the statement reads.

Palestinian officials are hoping the anti-Israel report will lead to prosecution of the Jewish state at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Senior PLO official Ahmed Majdalani praised the report, the Post said, calling it “an international testimony and new documentation that qualifies to prosecute Israel for its crimes.” The report, he said, “gives an accurate description of the racist and fascist occupation practices and war crimes” against the Palestinians.

Mustafa Barghouti, Secretary-General of the Palestinian National Initiative party, called on the Arabs to stop normalizing their relations with Israel due to the Amnesty report’s allegations.

“It is shameful for some Arab countries to normalize their relations with the apartheid regime,” Barghouti said. “Instead, the Arabs should boycott it and impose sanctions on it.”

Yuval Shany, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and a member of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Law, said it’s “highly unlikely” the ICC would pursue apartheid allegations given the complexities involved, AP reported.

Using the language of apartheid is “a bridge too far,” he said.

“We warmly welcome the publication of Amnesty International’s report, titled, “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel system of domination and crime against humanity,” The BDS Movement said in a press release calling for donations. “Our South Africa moment is nearing. With your support, we can and shall #DismantleApartheid to live in freedom, justice and equality.”

“The State of Israel absolutely rejects all the false allegations that appear in the report,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

“The report consolidates and recycles lies, inconsistencies, and unfounded assertions that originate from well-known anti-Israeli hate organizations, all with the aim of reselling damaged goods in new packaging. Repeating the same lies of hate organizations over and over does not make the lies reality, but rather makes Amnesty illegitimate.”

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Pompeo’s visit marks the first time a high-ranking American diplomat has formally visited Judea and Samaria.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Psagot Winery in Judea and Samaria, on the outskirts of Ramallah, on Thursday, to the dismay of Palestinians.

Earlier in the day, Pompeo confirmed that President Trump would honor a request from four Republican senators to officially change U.S. customs policy regarding products made in Judea and Samaria, so that said goods will be labeled “Made in Israel.”

Pompeo’s visit marks the first time a high-ranking American diplomat has formally visited Judea and Samaria.

In al-Bireh, a Ramallah suburb some 10 kilometers away from the Psagot Winery, Palestinians protested, waving flags and burning tires.

Holding signs with phrases such as “Pompeo Go Home” and “Pompeo is a Partner of a War Criminal,” scores of youth protested on the side of the road leading to Psagot.

“Pompeo’s visit is unprecedented. It makes him a participant in a war crime,” said Mustafa Barghouti, General Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative and a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) Central Council.

“This is an encouragement to the settlement building plans, and encouragement to the incremental annexation of the occupied Palestinian territories,” Barghouti told local media.

Barghuouti’s cousin, Marwan Barghouti, was sentenced to five cumulative life sentences in 2004 for his involvement in planning and executing terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens and a Greek Orthodox priest.

A group of Palestinian activists held a press conference against the visit, in which they publicly condemned Pompeo.

“We are telling the Americans, when you drink that wine, you are drinking the blood of the Palestinian people,” said Abdul Jawad Saleh, an activist.

Saleh’s remarks call to mind classic blood libels against Jews, which falsely allege that Jews murder non-Jewish children in order to obtain their blood for religious rituals.

A common blood libel is that Jews use the blood of non-Jewish children to prepare Matzah for Passover. This falsehood is in direct contrast to Jewish dietary laws, which explicitly prohibit the consumption of blood.

Blood libels have historically led to deadly pogroms against Jews.

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Israel’s former deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon and Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, discuss their impressions of the upcoming U.S. peace plan following White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s interview Tuesday at the TIME 100 Summit in New York City, where he gave hints about the deal without divulging the details.

The post WATCH: Palestinian and Israeli impressions of Trump peace plan appeared first on World Israel News.

Instead of praising the life of this advocate for peace between his people and their neighbors, the chosen Palestinian Arab BBC commentator launched into a vicious attack on his character and denied he ever wanted to make peace with his enemies.

On September 28, we all awakened to the sad news of the death of former Israeli President and Prime Minister Shimon Peres. My radio was tuned to National Public Radio, and soon after, the BBC World program spent most of their hour reviewing the life of the Israeli leader.  Inevitably, they turned to a Palestinian Arab personality to comment on what his life meant to the Arab side of the Arab war against Israel.

Instead of praising the life of this advocate for peace between his people and their neighbors, the chosen Palestinian Arab BBC commentator launched into a vicious attack on his character and denied he ever wanted to make peace with his enemies.  According to Mustafa Barghouti, Peres entered into the entire peace arrangement in order to swindle the Palestinian Arab population. “Mr. Peres probably used his intelligence to deceive the Palestinians, but at the end of the day, through Oslo Agreement, he deceived the whole cause of peace.”

This reaction reveals how deep Palestinian Arab intransigence runs. President Peres was probably the Israeli leader most attuned to the narrative of the Palestinian side in all of the history of his country. There is no doubt that the Oslo accords he initiated and supported have not lived up to the promise that some on both sides of the deal were hoping for. Still, the demonization of Peres is startling.  “In my opinion he was intelligent for sure. He used his smartness, his connections, to squeeze the Palestinians in an agreement that was unjust.”  Objective listeners could not possibly see the relationship between this straw man and the actual statesman he was describing.

The inability of Palestinian Arab leaders to say a good word about their supposed partner in negotiations is actually a revelation about why peace has not come to the region. Barghouti falls back to a classic anti-Semitic stereotype- the clever Jew who cannot be trusted to resist manipulating a negotiation for devious ends. He claims that Peres was not sincere by pointing out that the Israeli leader would never agree to the Palestinian demands for full sovereignty and control of all of Jerusalem.  The Israeli concerns about security, about their own claims to the territories, about the influence of Islamic extremism and Iranian influence over a Palestinian Arab government are not only not addressed, they are completely absent from the analysis.

The fairness of BBC?

In fairness, not all Palestinian Arabs share Barghouti’s bizarre opinion on the motivation of Peres. The fact that the BBC, knowing his views about Israel chose him to give the Palestinian Arab reaction to the death of Peres opens up a whole different discussion about fairness at the BBC. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who eulogized Peres as a great patriot despite decades of political enmity, also was quoted on the same BBC program. Bibi almost certainly feels that Peres consistently erred in the direction of wishful thinking at each step of the Oslo process.

In his comments Barghouti manages to slander Netanyahu as an “extremist.” The truth is that the entire Israeli electorate wants peace, from Peres on one side to Netanyahu on the other.

A recent poll of Palestinian Arabs, however, reveals that nearly 2/3 of the respondents stated that if they achieved their own state, “resistance should continue until all of historic Palestine is liberated.” The difference with the Arab approach speaks volumes about the prognosis for peace. If Palestinian Arabs cannot credit the motivation of perhaps the most idealistic side of the Israeli political spectrum, peace might have to wait for quite awhile.

By: Dan Pollak, Co-Director of Government Relations, Zionist Organization of America

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