Islamic and “Palestinian nationalist factions” in Hevron declared a day of mourning on Wednesday for the three Salafist jihad terrorists who Israel said were planning to attack Palestinian Authority official as well as Israelis, according to the Bethlehem-based Ma’an News Agency.

The IDF and Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) forces killed the three terrorists in Yatta, immediately south of Hevron, on Tuesday after meeting resistance during an attempt to arrest them.

The Islamists, apparently rejecting the Israeli statement, called on Arabs to “beware of Israeli media which disseminates poisonous reports in an attempt to harm Palestinian unity.”

The public editor of The New York Times said she received hundreds of complaints last week after the newspaper used a large and sympathetic photograph of a distraught Palestinian Authority mother to illustrate a story about her son’s stabbing to death of a sleeping Israeli soldier sitting next to him on a public bus.

The JTA  spoke on Monday afternoon to two senior editors at The Times, which prints all the news that fits its agenda. Both editors agreed that the photo was a regrettable choice because the dominant image with an article should reflect the overall point of the article and the reason for its newsworthiness.

“This did not represent the essence of the story, which was clearly the moment of the Israeli soldier being stabbed,” said Michele McNally, the assistant managing editor in charge of photography.

Vandals set fire to a building in an Arab village Wednesday night, leaving behind a painted slogan, “Hi from Eden – revenge,” referring to Palestinian Authority terrorist victim Eden Atias who was stabbed to death on Wednesday.

A military court on Thursday extended the 16-year-old terrorist’s remand until next week, when authorities will ask to be allowed to keep him in detention until charges are brought against him.

Several hundred demonstrators tried to block roads at the western entrance to Jerusalem Thursday afternoon to demand that the IDF weed out terrorists. Police arrested at least four people.

Two recent Palestinian Authority soccer tournaments included four teams named after terrorists who were behind some of the most lethal attacks that murdered Israeli civilians, Palestinian Media Watch reported Wednesday.

The games were not played in official Palestinian Authority tournaments, but the official PA daily’s reportage of the tournament’s “success to the souls of…martyrs” illustrates a culture of terror that has permeated the Palestinian Authority in education, politics and sports ever since the era of Yasser Arafat, who was a Palestinian as much as you and your mother-in-law. He was born in Egypt.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu commented after Wednesday’s fatal terrorist stabbing of a soldier by a terrorist from Jenin that “the incitement through official channels of the Palestinian Authority and schools must stop.”

It is too late.

The United States for more than two decades has turned two blind eyes and two deaf ears to constant incitement in which an entire generation has been brainwashed into thinking that life is a lot nicer when you can kill Jews and know.

The Oslo Accords of 1993 committed the Palestinian Authority to halt all incitement. The Bush Administration ignored official PA encouragement to murder Israelis, and the Obama administration has done worse be publicly stating it does not exist. President Barack Obama has said on a number of occasions that Mahmoud Abbas has stopped incitement.

Official PA incitement has been documented hundreds of times on these pages and in other media, ranging from official PA documents and maps showing the Palestinian Authority flag to wave over all of Israel to Abbas’ praise for terrorists, including honors in public squares.

With the adoption of the populist term of “resistance,” terror has officially been eliminated. Simply don’t say the word and it does not exist.

That is the only way to explain U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry remarkably stupid remark last week that Israel faces a third intifada because of its refusal to hand over most of Israel to Abbas on a silver platter.

When soccer teams are named after murderers, Abbas does not have to incite, but the fact that he allows soccer teams to be named after Yahya Ayyash, Dalal Mughrabi, and Ghassan Kanafan reflects tacit enthusiasm for their barbaric acts.

PMW reminds us that Ayyash was the first Hamas suicide bomb builder and planner, known as “the Engineer,” and is considered the founder of Palestinian suicide terror. He was behind attacks killing dozens of Israelis and injuring hundreds. Mughrabi led the most lethal terror attack in Israel’s history in 1978, when she and other terrorists hijacked a bus on the Coastal Road and killed 37 civilians, 12 of them children.

Kanafani was a writer and a leader of the terror organization the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The PFLP has planned and carried out numerous terror attacks against Israeli civilians since its founding in 1967.

All three teams bearing the names of these terrorist played in a tournament at Al Quds University in Shechem.

A fourth team that played in another tournament was named after terrorist Ziyad Da’as, a commander of the Tanzim, a faction of Abbas’ Fatah party,

Da’as planned the attack at a Bat-Mitzvah celebration in Hadera on Jan. 17, 2002, in which a terrorist gunman killed six and wounded dozens. He  also participated in the kidnapping and murder of Etgar Zeituni and Motti Dayan in Tulkarm in January 2001. Israeli military police killed him killed during a clash in 2002.

Although the Palestinian Authority did not run the tournaments, PMW translated and published a report by the PA official daily.

“At the end of the special tournament, the heroic martyrs who fulfilled their duty to the homeland were honored,” the newspaper wrote. “Mohammed Tamouni, the martyr’s brother, dedicated the big win and the tournament’s success to the souls of his brother and all of Palestine’s martyrs, who are more honorable than all of us. Tamouni said that this tournament will continue to take place annually in order to remember the heroes whom we will never forget.”

Other teams were named after more “minor” terrorists, such as Amer Nassar, killed in 2013 by the Israeli army after throwing a Molotov cocktail at a military post.

The IDF has identified the victim of Wednesday’s Palestinian Authority terrorist attack as 19-year-old Eden Atias, of Nazareth Illit in the Lower Galilee.

The 16-year-old attacker, from Jenin, pounced on his helpless victim while he was sleeping on an Egged bus at Afula, approximately five miles north of Jenin.

The bus had stopped for a break before its scheduled trip to Nazareth Illit, and it was empty except for Atias and two other soldiers. The murderer ran out the back door but was quickly overcome by security guards who had been alerted of the attack by a women soldier, apparently unarmed, who fled the bus while screaming that a soldier has been stabbed.

The terrorist said he acted out of revenge for Israel’s having sentenced two of his relatives to jail, one of them with a life sentence for terror.

That is all the State Dept. needs to tone down its response to the attack, in contrast to Tuesday’s bellyaching over reports that Housing Minister Uri Ariel hired an architect to draw up plans for new homes and apartments in the controversial E-1 area in the city of Maaleh Adumim and in smaller towns in Judea and Samaria. When Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu got wind of the news, he promptly Ariel to back off and freeze his plans.

The State Dept. will say in a more diplomatic tone, “If Israel simply would release all terrorists and prisoners, there will be peace” and never mind the victims of the revolving door terrorists who return to their favorite occupation of killing Jews.

The latest murder at the hands of Palestinian Authority Arabs, the sixth this year, occurred only days after the liberal bleeding heart wing of the defense establishment served up warnings that Israel is about to face a third intifada.

Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, a lot more level-headed than most of the “experts” who are panting after the Obama administration to show how much they cooperate with the United States, insisted, “There is no sign of a popular uprising or so-called third intifada.”

Almost every one of this year’s murders has been carried out by lone terrorists, not connected with any terrorist organization.

But U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who thinks he knows more about Israel’s security needs than anyone else in Israel, piped up last week with a warning that Israel faces a “third intifada” if it doesn’t give up its crazy idea that 600,000 Jews in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria have a right to remain there as Jewish people in a Jewish state.

Hamas, which praised Wednesday’s terrorist attacks, definitely agrees with Kerry and is active in Hevron, Jenin, Shechem and other areas, but there is no popular support in Judea and Samaria for a revolt against Israel.

The average Mohammed does not want another round of violence, retaliation and the resultant economic stagnation that only would further postpone into eternity the date for establishing the Palestinian Authority as a country.

The average Mohammed is more concerned with Abbas’ corrupt regime and his single-minded aim to head a new Arab state that is totally dependent on foreign handouts and ignores the daily needs of its own people.

Every effort by the Palestinian Authority to organize “million man protests” has succeeded in bringing out 1,000,000 Arabs minus the last there zeroes.

The people aren’t interested.

The violence comes from lone rangers, usually teenagers or young men who have grown up with 20 years of incitement from their PA schools and Muslim preachers.

They don’t need Kerry to teach them to kill, but the Secretary of State’s statement is music to the ears of Hamas and the terrorist arm, known as the “military branch,” of Abbas’ Fatah party.

The threat of an intifada is simply another gimmick to pressure the Netanyahu government to fold up, go back to the edge of the Mediterranean Sea, and wait for the next boat.

The problem is one of “adaptive expectation.” If you think inflation is going to go rampant, you go out and buy like crazy, which encourages sellers to raise prices and bingo – inflation.

If the Obama administration continues to spout off the threat of violence, it will happen.

When Kerry responded rhetorically to an Israeli reporter last week and said, ”Do you want a third intifada,” he really meant, “I want a third intifada if that is what it takes to earn the Nobel “Peace” Prize.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef reversed his famous “Land for Peace” ruling of 1993 after the Palestinian Authority literally exploded in Israel’s face a decade later with large-scale terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings.

The revelation of the letter, seen below, explains Rav Ovadia’s incredibly strong statements in recent sermons, such as one of the most famous ones three years ago when he said of the Palestinian Authority, “All these evil people should perish from this world. God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians.”

In 1993, when the prospect of peace turned into a mantra that mass media used to blind themselves and wishful-thinkers, the idea of Israel’s surrendering Judea, Gaza and Samaria for peace with Yasser Arafat was pushed by U.S. President Bill Clinton.

The Israeli government was split, and the Shas party, which obeyed whatever Rav Ovadia said, withstood arguments from nationalists and kept the Rabin-Peres coalition government alive with his famous ruling in favor of giving up “land for peace” because it is a matter of “pikuach nefesh,” saving the lives of Jews.

After Rav Ovadia died, Israel’s populist but rather ignorant media turned the funeral into a peace festival that obliterated the greatness of the rabbi, who wrote 50 books and who was cited all over the world as one of the greatest Torah sages ever.

The “expert analysts” on Israel radio and in the mass media explained that Rav Ovadia was a great man, but not because of  his brilliant mind that lived and breathed Torah and not because of the Shas party that he founded and turned into a kingmaker in Israeli politics.

“Land for peace” was the reason 800,000 Jews from all sects of Israeli society came to the funeral.

What they did not say is that 10 years after Oslo, during the Second Intifada that also is known as the Oslo War, Rav Ovadia ruled exactly the opposite.

Instead of “land for peace” being an issue to save the lives of Jews, it had become clear that it was a concept that endangered Jews.

Arafat’s “peace,” which murdered more than 1,000 Jews, wounded thousands others and which continues until today under the invisible hand of Mahmoud Abbas, is not the peace Rav Ovadia had in mind.

He wrote, “My dear brothers of Israel, residents of Judea and Samaria:

“It is my intention to make clear my position concerning Judea and Samaria. I have explained more than once since my Halachic ruling, that giving up land for peace has no validity in light of the current situation.

“I intended there be a true peace, in which Jerusalem and its surroundings will be secure in peace and quiet. But now, our eyes see that surrendering our holy land causes a danger to life.

“This is not the peace for which we prayed. Therefore, the Oslo Accords are null and void.”

Rav Ovadia then cited the verse form Psalms that states, “I speak peace and they speak war.”

Just as populist media falsified Rav Ovadia’s ruling, it has turned Jews in Israel and all over the world into victims of ignorant and slanderous reporting of Rav Ovadia’s Saturday night sermons. They took phrases out of contact and without any understanding that the rabbis was speaking the language his constituents understood, which is not the style of the pseudo-sophisticated Ashkenazi elite and certainly not that of the bleeding-heart media.

The Aish HaTorah website once quoted Rav Ovadia with comments that stated much clearer his idea of land for peace.

It quoted Rav Ovadia as saying, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef stated: “If the heads and commanders of the army, together with the government, state that saving of life is involved; that if areas of Israel are not given back, the danger exists of immediate war on the part of our Arab neighbors;

“And if the areas are returned to them, the danger of war will be averted; and that there is a chance of permanent peace; then it seems that according to all opinions it is permitted to return areas of Israel in order to achieve this aim, since nothing is more important than the saving of life.”

The Palestinian Authority war or terror on Israeli in the 1990s, after the Oslo Accords did not satisfy Arafat’s appetite to swallow up Israel, took a breather towards the end of the decade when the Barak government was on the verge of giving Arafat almost everything he wanted.

IDF soldiers identified and arrested a Palestinian Authority terrorist  who was carrying a pistol and ammunition  in Samaria with the intention to open fire on a bus traveling nearby.

Two buses were hit by gunfire in the same area in two separate incidents over the past four weeks.

“Security forces conducted surveillance operations in anticipation of a future terrorist attack against the passing buses in the area. Soldiers who were stationed on the buses as part of the operations identified the suspect and prevented the impending attack,” said Samaria Regional Brigade Col. Yoav Yarom.

Israelis protested and held vigils in locations around Judea and Samaria on Friday. The locations where the vigils were held were selected based on locations on the road where Jews have been recently attacked by Arabs.

Some of the locations included the roads near Beit El, the Beitar Junction on Road 60, El Arub near Hebron, and Kedumim. Between dozens to a hundred protesters took to the streets.

The protesters are demanding the army and government take a stronger approach to the Arab terrorists who are targeting Israelis on the road.

Road protest near Beit El