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yesterday after the leader of a 1978 bus hijacking in which 35 Israelis were killed.
The ceremony, in Al-Bireh, a town near the Palestinian city of Ramallah, was held while Israelis mourned five members of a Jewish settler family knifed to death on Saturday in a West Bank settlement in an attack Israel blamed on Palestinians.
Many Palestinians see Dalal al-Mughrabi, a member of the then-underground Fatah movement, as a heroine for her role in hijacking the bus on Israel’s Haifa-Tel Aviv highway.
Israelis consider Mughrabi, who was killed in the incident, a terrorist.
“We stand here in praise of our martyrs and in loyalty to all of the martyrs of the national movement,” Fatah member Sabri Seidam said at the unveiling of a plaque showing Mughrabi cradling a rifle against a backdrop map of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The square was festooned with Palestinian flags.
Around a dozen people – none of them Palestinian government officials – attended the ceremony.
Ron Dermer, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said the Palestinian Authority had “allowed a public square to be named after a mass murderer who perpetrated one of the worst terror attacks in Israel’s history”. – Reuters.