UN body labels terror victim Eli Kay a ‘settler’

Pro-Palestinian bias shows, as ‘settler’ is a term reserved in Israel for those who live in Judea and Samaria, which Kay did not.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A UN agency has officially declared terror victim Eli Kay who was murdered in the Old City of Jerusalem last week a “settler” killed in “occupied Palestinian territory (OPT),” Arutz 7 reported Thursday.

The report said that although Kay had been a resident of the central city of Modiin, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) labeled Kay a “citizen-settler” on a list it keeps of both Palestinians and Israelis who are killed or injured in the “OPT.” An interactive map of casualties on its website shows that the 26-year-old victim of a Palestinian gunman was shot in the “occupied territory” of Jerusalem.

The term ‘settler’ is usually reserved in Israel for Jews who live in Judea and Samaria, who settled, or populated, the area after Israel liberated it from Jordanian occupation in 1967’s Six Day War. The UN and all its affiliated bodies calls this region, as well as the liberated eastern part of Jerusalem, the OPT.

This, although Judea and Samaria are legally “disputed territory,” with Israel laying strong historical claim to it as well as the right to hold it as it was won in a defensive war. The Israeli government annexed the eastern part of Jerusalem immediately after the war to form a united capital city.

Shai Glick, CEO of Betzalmo, an NGO that fights for Jewish and Israeli human rights, rapped the organization for its faulty geographical knowledge.

“For many years, the UN has been a biased and political body,” Glick said. “But now it has been proven that it is a body that does not even bother to check the simplest and most basic facts. Although the attack took place in the Old City of Jerusalem, Eliyahu Kay is a resident of the city of Modi’in and is not a settler.”

MK Itamar Ben-Gvir of the Opposition’s Religious Zionist party, was equally incensed but also blamed the government for not advocating for the truth.

“The UN continues to serve the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel narrative,” he said. “At every opportunity, the UN tries to establish facts on the ground, defining [the territory] as occupied and distorting reality, because the UN is led by opponents of the State of Israel and haters of Jews. And [Foreign Minister Yair] Lapid is silent like a fish and afraid that the Moslem Brotherhood in the coalition will overthrow the government.”

Kay had immigrated to Israel alone from South Africa in 2016 and joined the army as a lone soldier after learning for a short time in a yeshiva. After his service, he lived on a kibbutz on the Gaza border for a while before moving to Modiin. He was shot and killed on November 21 while walking near the Western Wall.