Palestinian Authority officials have stated that Israel is trying to “exert pressure” in peace talks by not agreeing to accept a document from Gaza with the letterhead of “State of Palestine.”

The document was a request from officials in Gaza to allow 190 residents to leave Gaza for medical care in Israel, including Arab hospitals in Judea and Samaria. Israeli military officials objected to the letterhead, and the patients were allowed to cross into Israel after “State of Palestine” was blurred out.

That would seem to the end of the matter, with an “all’s well that ends well” conclusion.

But the Palestinian Authority regime in Ramallah, along with its Hamas colleagues in Gaza, as usual tried to turn the issue against Israel, blaming it not only for blocking medical care but also for supposedly exploiting sick people for political purposes.

“This is a political decision from the Israelis to exert pressure in the negotiations,” a senior Palestinian official at the Gaza district coordination office told the Bethlehem-based Ma’an News Agency.

If that isn’t “calling the kettle black,” what is?

Besides all of the “core issues” on Jerusalem, so-called refugees and borders, the heart of the Palestinian Authority-Israeli dispute is PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s refusal to agree to a “State of Palestine” unless all arguments and issues are settled without any further demands.

The letter from Gaza was no more and no less than cynical exploitation of ailing men, women and children to “exert pressure in the negotiations,” to borrow the quote from the PA official.

Once Israel accepts a document from Hamas as being from the “State of Palestine,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry can put it on a silver platter and present it to President Barack Obama. Once the “State of Palestine” is a fait accompli, the “core issues” fall like a house of dominoes because as head of an official state.”

Abbas can declare that the sun rises in the west and sets in the east and so it will be, at least on paper. He can divide Jerusalem, define Israel’s borders and go the United Nations to pass a resolution that UNRWA should send to Israel several million Arabs living under U.N. occupation foreign countries.

International wire services, of course, were not content to let their readers draw conclusions without biased information. Maher Abukhater is an “a Palestinian journalist based in Ramallah” and is The Los Angeles Times’ source for information for everything they know about Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

His “objectivity” can be understood by his former position as managing editor of Al-Fajr English weekly and The Palestine Times. There is not one former managing editor of any Israeli newspaper who reports for any major foreign news organization, or even a minor one. Let’s see The New York Times hire me to cover Israel.

Abukhater made sure that his readers in the United States know that “the PLO declared independence unilaterally in 1988 and was recognized as a ‘non-member observer state’ by the United Nations in 2012.”

What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

The PLO declared itself an independent state, so that makes it one?

When Israel, declared by the United Nations as a full member and independent country, passes a law that  it is the sovereign authority over and in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, used by foreign armies to wage war in 1967, that is not acceptable.

Abukhater then hit his readers over the head with the hammer and wrote, “More than 130 countries today recognize Palestine’s existence as a state, but Israel refuses to do so.”

A terrorist from the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) was critically wounded Sunday morning in an Israeli Air-force attack in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, while riding his motorcycle, according to the IDF Spokesperson’s office.

The assassination attempt was executed in cooperation with the Shabac-GSS. Palestinian sources report a second injury as a result of the same attack.

According to the IDF, the attack’s target, Abdullah Harti, 29, had taken part in shooting rockets into Israel and in planning additional high-trajectory rocket attacks.

“The IDF is seriously concerned about every shooting attempt into the State of Israel and will continue to act with force against any terror attempt. The IDF is laid out and prepared to defend the citizens of the State of Israel,” the IDF Spokesperson stated.

Harti, a resident of the Nuseirat Refugee Camp, had been involved in recent years in planning and executing different kinds of attacks against Israel in the Gaza Strip and along the Sinai border. Among other acts of terrorism, Harti has been collaborating with the Global Jihad Ansar Beit al-Maqdisi group in the northern Sinai, an attack on Rt. 12 in August 2011, and several rocket volleys against Eilat last January.

Terrorists form Gaza attacked Israel with one and possibly two missiles on Thursday despite pledges by Hamas that it would halt rocket firing.

Either Hamas is not capable of controlling rival terrorist gangs, which has been the situation off and on for more two years, or it has returned to its old tactic of  pledging ceasefires and allowing others to break them.

One rocket exploded south of Ashkelon early Thursday afternoon south of Ashkelon, exploding in an open area without causing damage, and  a second blast was heard at night. The point of impact has not been determined.

The IDF contradicted a report from local officials that the Iron Dome system intercepted the first missile.

One rocket also was fired on the area on Tuesday.

Mohammed Dahlan, the former Fatah party strongman in Gaza, denied on Thursday that he recently met with Shlomo Molcho, one of Israel’s two negotiators with the Palestinian Authority and a confidant to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

The Maariv newspaper reported that the two men met in Dubai to establish a closer relationship with Dahlan, who told European Parliament members in Brussels last month that he is planning to replace Abbas.

Abbas is in his sixth year as chairman since his term four=year term ran out following the Palestinian Authority’s first and, as of today, the only presidential election.

Given Dahan’s stated intentions in Brussels, his denial is worth as much as the word of any Palestinian Authority official.

Dahlan literally ran Gaza until Hamas overthrow the Fatah faction in a bloody militia war in 2007.

He was one of the most feared men in Gaza, known for total corruption and for close ties with Israeli leaders.

Dahlan told the Bethlehem-based Ma’an News Agency Thursday he has not met with Molcho since the late 1990s and called the Maariv report “fiction.”

Thee eastern Jerusalem Arabs were sentenced to prison terms of four to seven years Wednesday for organizing Hamas activities and spreading its ideology. The Jerusalem court verdict declared that Hamas is trying “to take control of Jerusalem” through social activities, which is exactly the model Hezbollah used to take over southern Lebanon.

The court denied the defendants arguments that they simply were administrators who organized activities.

Hamas, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, has learned to sell its terrorism through social activities, supporting low-income families and educating children to hate Israel.

The court rules that the three Hamas leaders, who visited families of dead terrorists and met with terrorists who have been arrested, worked to persuade Arabs to accept Hamas ideology.

One of the Hamas men was charged with transferring funds from Jordan to Israel for the purpose of terror.

Hamas continues to dig underground, building dozens of tunnels used to attack and kidnap Israelis while manufacturing powerful weapons, producing missiles that can reach major Israeli cities such as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

The terrorist authority has trained civilians to become experts in building underground tunnel, IDF spokesmen stated on the military’s blog website.“Hamas’ military wing devotes about 20 percent of its budget to building these tunnels inside Gaza, many of which lead under the border into Israel.

IDF soldiers last October discovered the opening of a 60-foot deep and mile-long tunnel built by Gaza terrorists near the Israeli community of Ein HaShlosha.

“There’s one Gaza above ground, and another one underground,” said a senior officer in the IDF Intelligence Corps. “Tunneling has existed [in Gaza] since the mid 1990s, but it has really grown into an industry. More funds are invested in it – we’re talking about millions of dollars every year – and the need for engineers are growing.

“Our estimate is that there are tens of tunnels from Gaza into Israel, only half of which we know about. Hamas pays professionals to train special military units that have one simple purpose: to dig and tunnel underground.”

Since the end of Operation Pillar of Defense, in November 2012, Hamas has been busy rebuilding its arsenal. Because importing weapons has become more difficult for Hamas, the terrorist organization has begun manufacturing rockets inside Gaza, and Hamas is producing the M-75, which can reach as far as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

“They focus on rockets of higher quality,” explained the officer. “During Operation Pillar of Defense, only five M-75 rockets were fired, but we expect more in a future conflict.” The rocket is only one part of Hamas’ expanding arsenal. Today there are more than 10,000 rockets, mortar shells and ammunition in the hands of the Gaza terrorists.

The head of IDF Intelligence said on Wednesday that enemy countries have 170,000 missiles ready to be fired on Israel, a threat that is worse than the Iranian nuclear program.

The numbers have been known before the sum total was announced by Intelligence Director Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi. It has been reported dozens of times that Hezbollah has anywhere between 60,000 and 100,000 missiles It also is a given that Syria, Hamas and Sinai terrorists have an arsenal in the tens of thousands.

Kochavi, speaking at a security conference in Tel Aviv, also said that cyber warfare is the greatest revolution in warfare since the invention of gunpowder and that Israel.

Israeli soldiers  “escorted” more than 150 Jewish settlers to “defile the holy Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem” on Wednesday, according to the official Hamas terrorist organization’s website.

The “settlers” included “male and female conscripts and policemen in plain clothes [who] broke into the Aqsa Mosque.

Hamas added, ”The notorious rabbi Yehuda Glick, who champions demolishing the Aqsa Mosque to build the third temple in its place, was among the settlers who roamed the Aqsa courtyards and the Dome of the Rock.”

What is most interesting about their little blurb is that most of it is essentially true, except for a few code words, and reflects a drastic change in police policies towards IDF soldiers visiting the Temple Mount.

First the facts. The Jews, of course, did not “break in” the mosque. Any Jew who visits the Temple Mount always is accused of defiling it, breaking in, storming, invading or occupying the site, according to the Fatah propaganda machine in Ramallah as well as Hamas in Gaza. On that, Mahmoud Abbas and his brethren in Hamas are in full agreement, so it should never be said that the two rival “resistance” movements have nothing in common.

As for the “settlers,” any Jew living in under a Zionist entity, as radical Muslims like to call Israel so they won’t have to mention the cursed name, is a “settler” in the terminology of the “resistance.”

Rabbi Yehuda Glick explained to The Jewish Press Thursday that in fact there were approximately 100 female soldiers from the Education Corps visiting the Temple Mount earlier this week, the largest group he can remember.

The other “settlers” besides Rabbi Glick, who lives in Otniel, located in the southern Hebron Hills between Be’er Sheva and Kiryat Arab-Hevron, were 35 orthodox Jews from the Rinat Israel synagogue in Teaneck, New Jersey.

So it appears that most of the readers of The Jewish Press, out there in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, East Podunk and all points in between, also are settlers.

Welcome to the club.

The sight of Israeli soldiers visiting the Temple Mount is relatively new. Rabbi Glick said that until two years ago, police would not allow any uniformed soldiers to visit the holy site.

All that changed with the help of Knesset Member Tzipi Hotovely of the Likud and then-MK Aryeh Eldad of the National Union party that later merged into the Jewish Home, causing Eldad to form his own party.

Rabbi Glick said that one of the officers on the Temple Mount invited him to say a few words to the soldiers to explain the history of the Temple Mount.

The Arabs were relatively quiet, except for the usual screaming,  \hollering and cursing of Jews.

He explained that he was told the reason might be that the Arabs are on some kind of vacation this month.

Below is a YouTube video of the Teaneck delegation with their Rabbi, Yosef Adler.