UN official hurt in stoning: ‘Allah will forgive them’
Mounir Kleibo, who was wounded when Palestinians pelted his vehicle with rocks, declines to condemn attack
October 12, 2015, 11:13 pm
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Illustrative image of damage to a car pelted with stones outside Jerusalem on September 20, 2015. (Courtesy)
A senior United Nations official
who was injured when Palestinians threw rocks at his car wrote on
Facebook that “Allah will forgive the rock throwers.”
Mounir
Kleibo, who heads the UN bureau of the International Labor Organization
in the Palestinian Territories, sustained serious injuries to his jaw
after coming under attack by Palestinian rock throwers in East Jerusalem
on Friday.
The UN coordinator for development and
humanitarian activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, Robert
Piper, condemned the attack “on a clearly marked United Nations (UN)
vehicle traveling on Route 50 in East Jerusalem, which seriously injured
a senior UN official.
“I join the rest of the UN family in wishing our colleague a speedy recovery,” he wrote later on Friday.
Piper’s statement did not identify Kleibo either by name or position.
A report in the Hebrew-language NRG website
noted that Kleibo’s Facebook profile was overtly pro-Palestinian,
despite his being a UN official.
Kleibo’s cover picture shows the dome of the al-Aqsa Mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and his profile picture is the word “Shuhada” (“Martyrdom”) on a black background.
In one of his posts, Kleibo wrote, “We mourn not only our shahids but also ourselves, our eyes, our hearts, our consciousness and our humanity.”
After the attack — in an update apparently
posted from his hospital bed at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem’s Ein
Kerem neighborhood — Kleibo said that both he and his wife, Tamara,
were fine, and then added, “May Allah forgive those who throw the rocks
at night.”
A Foreign Ministry official told NRG that it
was “regrettable that the UN did not explicitly condemn all Palestinian
stone throwers, who hurt, among others, a senior UN official.
“One can be even sorrier that the same
official, a victim of Palestinian violence, continues praising it on his
Facebook page,” the official added.
Escalating tensions between Israelis and
Palestinians in recent weeks have seen an increasing number of
rock-throwing attacks by Palestinian protesters against Israeli
civilians and security forces.
The attacks have prompted Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu to seek harsher penalties for stone throwers,
including instituting mandatory minimum sentences.
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