Israel rebukes UN Peace Process Coordinator for reframing Palestinian terrorist attack as ‘scuffle with Israeli soldier’
Senior Israeli official called the post “a distortion of reality”
Israel rebuked the United Nations’ Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process for his tweet characterizing a terror attack as a “scuffle” and claiming to be “horrified by today’s killing of a Palestinian man, Ammar Mifleh, during a scuffle with an Israeli soldier.”
Senior Israeli Foreign Ministry official, Emmanuel Nahshon, rebuked U.N. Special Coordinator Tor Wennesland on Saturday evening for his Twitter post, calling it “a distortion of reality.”
“This is NOT a ‘scuffle’ – this is a terror attack!” Nahshon wrote in response to Wennesland.
In the terror attack on Friday, a Palestinian attempt to enter the vehicle of an Israeli couple waiting in traffic before attacking two Border Patrol officers who responded to the scene.
Footage of the altercation, widely shared on Twitter, showed the suspect struggling with one of the officers, trying to steal his weapon – after having stabbed the other officer. When he grabbed for the second police officer’s M-16, the officer unholstered his handgun and shot the attacker four times, killing him.
Many of those who shared the video on the social media platform attempted to cast the shooting of the terrorist as another example of “Israeli aggression.”
In his own tweet, Wennesland made no reference to Mifleh’s stabbing of the first police officer nor to his attempt to grab the weapon of the second.
Both Israel’s current Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz wrote on Twitter in support of the Border Police. In his tweet, Lapid said that “any attempt to distort reality and tell a false story in the world is simply a disgrace.” He went on to wish a speedy recovery to the officer who was stabbed.
U.N. officials commenting on events in Israel regularly present partial or distorted versions of such incidents and this is the latest example of bias demonstrated by the U.N. toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The All Israel News Staff is a team of journalists in Israel.
