Seventeen years after Palestinian terrorists broke into her Nahariya home and murdered her family, Smadar Haran dismissed an apology offered this week by the Palestinian who masterminded the attack.
At the same time, Haran said she did not oppose Abul Abbas’ entry into the Gaza Strip to attend a meeting of the Palestine National Council.
She said she hopes that his presence at the meeting would serve the interests of peace.
“Being sorry won’t bring back the people who died,” Haran told Israel Radio. “But if he’s sorry, I want to see him signing the new manifesto” that would revoke those portions of the PNC’s charter calling for Israel’s destruction.
Abbas, whose real name is Mohammed Abbas, entered Gaza on Monday via the Rafah Crossing from Egypt to attend the PNC meeting.
He was one of several terrorists allowed by Israel to return from exile to the territories to participate in the PNC session.
Abbas, who heads the Palestine Liberation Front, has been in hiding since an Italian court convicted him in absentia to life imprisonment for masterminding the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship.
During the three-day hijacking, Palestinian terrorists shot Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound American Jew, and threw his body overboard.
Abbas, who was a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Executive Committee at the time of the hijacking, proved to be an embarrassment to his mentor, PLO leader Yasser Arafat, who has disassociated himself from the Achille Lauro incident.
In interviews Monday, Abbas said he was sorry about the Achille Lauro hijacking, which he described as “a mistake.”
“There were no orders to kill civilians,” he added.
He also said it was time to forget the past.
“We are in a new stage, the era of peace, and we should all, Israelis and Palestinians, start a new chapter,” Abbas told reporters.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
