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 Israel Broadcasting Authority (IBA), a rusty and overweighed government body that has been threatened with a shutdown because of mismanagement and leftist bias, now has been exposed for billing dead people, including fallen soldiers.

An old law gives the IBA the opportunity to rake in money by letting it bill anyone who owns a television.

The IBA has been known for years for billing parole who do not own a television, but Globes business newspaper revealed that it sent out bills to at least six families in the name of their sons who died in battle or terrorist attacks.

Menachem Nevenzhal, whose son Yair was killed in a terrorist attack in 2001, told the newspaper that he sent a copy of the bill to Communications Minister Gilad Erdan. He wrote the minister, “During my last visit to the military cemetery, I did not find any television on the grave” of his son.

Ironically, the Defense Ministry pays the fees for television owned by families of fallen soldiers.

The IBA told Globes, “The Broadcasting Authority is aware of the incidents and expresses its apologies to the families of the fallen soldiers .We promise them that we will take action to prevent future incidents.

On Saturday evening, an Arab from Shechem arrived at the Bikaot checkpoint. He told the soldiers he has 4 pipe bombs on him.

IDF demolition experts are working on disarming the bombs.

UPDATE: 7:06 PM - The explosive device on the terrorist’s body has been neutralized.

ORIGINAL REPORT:

An Arab terrorist opened fire with a flare gun on an IDF soldier and some youths standing at a hitchhiking post at the Tapuach junction in the Shomron.

The soldier returned fire, killing the terrorist. There are no reports of any other people injured or killed in the attack.

The area around the junction has been cleared as the IDF disarms an explosive device on his body.

The junction is currently closed to all traffic.

Five IDF soldiers were injured last night at the start of the clash with Gaza.

A Golani unit was in the process of destroying the terror tunnel discovered on October 7 that led to the inside of Israeli Kibbutz Ein HaShlosha, when they were injured in an explosion. It is not yet clear if the explosion was from an explosive device or mortar fire.

Reportedly, the soldiers were 100 meters inside Gaza, working on destroying the part of the terror tunnel on the Gaza side of the fence.

The soldiers were evacuated to Soroka hospital in Be’er Sheva by helicopter. At least one was brought in, in serious condition, one in moderate, and the rest with lighter injuries.

The soldier who was seriously injured is Achiyah Klein (Achiyah ben Nira) of Kfar Etzion. Klein is an officer in the Yahalam combat engineering unit.

The IDF responded with tank fire, helicopter fire, and reportedly navy fire at Khan Yunis in Gaza.

Four Gazan terrorists were killed in the IDF response.

Recently, the IDF began reducing the forces placed within the Gaza border communities, saying that the situation is now safer along the Gaza border. On Thursday evening the IDF pulled out their last soldier stationed within the communities in Sha’ar HaNegev.

The Mossad gave an assessment this week, that as US pressured talks progress with the Palestinian Authority, Hamas will escalate their terror activities against Israel.

The Palestinian Authority has announced it will plant 750,000 trees in Judea and Samaria, enough to make a land grab in all of “Area C,” which officially is under Israeli sovereignty.

The tree-planting is ostensibly meant to replace those allegedly damaged by Jews, but that number is only 4,000, according to the Bethlehem-based Ma’an News Agency.

Caretaker Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah said at the 13th annual Olive Harvest Festival in Bethlehem on Saturday that planting trees is important to jobs and economic development.

However, planting that many trees would not be good for the economy or for olive orchard owners because the astronomical number would flood the market and drive down prices.

The announcement in fact marks the beginning of a massive land grab that has been slowly underway for 15 years, with the helping hands of the Defense Ministry, the IDF and the Civil Administration.

The strategy has been to encroach on what used to be Jordanian government land that came under Israeli authority in the Six-Day War in 1967. Virtually all of the land south of Hevron, and a large portion in Samaria, north of Jerusalem, never has been under any private ownership. The Turkish authorities in the Ottoman Empire often divided up the land among their friends, without any official title.

The situation remained constant under Jordanian rule, which was even more of an occupation than that allegedly exercised by Israel. The Arabs refused to accept the United Nations Partition plan that would have created a Trans-Jordan country over most of what is now Israel. After they lost the war to destroy Israel, Jordan, without U.N. approval, took over most of Judea and Samaria and administered it just as Israel does today, although with far less interest in its development.

After 1967, Israel used some of the government land for new Jewish communities, but most of it remained barren. Arabs generally were not interested in expanding – until they saw Jews settling around them.

After the Oslo Accords in 1993, the Israeli government and particularly the Civil Administration, acted to defend Arabs who decided to plant on government land, even where Jews already had farmed it for years.

Organizations such as the lofty-sounding Rabbis for Human Rights, along with foreign leftists and anarchists of the International Solidarity Movement, literally worked for the Arabs and uprooted trees that had been planted by Jews and replaced them with saplings on behalf of the Palestinian Authority Arab comrades.

I have previously reported that I was eyewitness to this phenomena several times, and each time the military and Civilian Administration ruled in favor of the Arabs, even though there is no legal ownership.

A quick math exercise shows that 750,000 olive trees will more than cover Area C, which covers approximately 500,000 acres, including thousands of acres that are not suitable for olive trees. It would result in overcrowded orchards where the trees could barely survive, if that. The recommended density is approximately 100 trees per acre.

Even if the 750,000 trees were to be distributed over the entire 1.5 million acres of Judea and Samaria, including  Areas A and B under total or partial Palestinian Authority control, there would be plenty of trees left over.

The political result, and the mathematical result, is that the PA with European Union money, has found the ultimate weapon. Once the PA surrounds Jewish communities with Arab farmland, which it will claim has been theirs since Biblical times, Tzipi Livni can simply sit back in her armchair and wait for terrorists to make life miserable for the Jews and create a new version of Gush Katif.

In that scenario a decade ago, Jewish woman, men and children were killed and wounded right and left, leaving the government and the chorus from foreign and local mass media to come to the conclusion that, “Yes these Jews really are the ‘salt of the earth’ but let’s expel them for their own good.”

A personal note to Tzipi: Remember, you live in northern Tel Aviv.

Remember that after the expulsion of Jews from Gaza, you and your cronies said Hamas would not attack again.

Remember, Tzipi, the government let southern Israel suffer from missile attacks but woke up when Tel Aviv was threatened.

Iran’s government-controlled Fars News Agency reported on Sunday that Syrian forces seized “Israeli-made missiles, machine guns, rifles and communication devices” in clashes with rebels in the Daraa region.

Saudi Arabia has been known to be a major supplier of weapons to opposition forces, so if the report has any validity, it raises the fanciful scenario that the oil-rich kingdom is buying weapons from Israel and then shipping them to Al Qaeda terrorists who are using Zionist guns.

Israeli military spokesmen revealed Sunday that human bones were found in northern Israel two weeks ago and be those of a soldier who has been listed as “missing” since the war for Independence in 1948.

“The bones were transferred to investigators with the IDF’s missing persons branch. The identity of the bones is under investigation,” the IDF said in a statement to the Hebrew language Yediot Acharonot newspaper.

Six soldiers have been declared missing since 1948.