By World Israel News Staff

A senior Palestinian Authority official accuses Israel recently of collaborating with the Hamas terror organization to orchestrate the October 7th invasion of southwestern Israel and massacre of some 1,200 people.

The Palestinian Authority, led by the Fatah party, has over the past year and a half criticized its long-time rival Hamas for the impact of the ongoing war in Gaza on civilians in the tiny coastal enclave.

However, the Ramallah-based autonomous entity has refused to condemn Hamas for the invasion of October 7th, 2023, the abduction of over 250 people, and the mass-killings, rapes, torture, and mutilation of civilians and soldiers.

Last month, a senior PA official appeared on Youtube in an interview with Al-Arabiya, promoting a conspiracy theory accusing Israel of orchestrating the 2023 invasion, and hinted that Hamas may have “assisted” Israel.

In the video, which was uploaded on April 21st, Mahmoud Al-Habbash claims that Israel was secretly responsible for laying the groundwork for the Hamas invasion, which he suggested was a false flag operation to create “an excuse” for Israel to destroy “the Palestinian cause.”

“This [Israeli] government was not really interested in the [Israeli] hostages from the beginning,” Al-Habbash said, according to a report by the Palestinian Media Watch group.

“Perhaps the coming days will reveal this issue, which is now being talked about in Israel by the media outlets and Israeli commentators regarding the role of Netanyahu’s government in the events of October 7th.”

“Perhaps it prepared the conditions and led Hamas to this issue, because it had a plan that it wanted to carry out in the Gaza Strip using what happened on Oct. 7 as an excuse.”

“It is now carrying out this plan, which is based on eliminating the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian existence, and perhaps it used Hamas on this issue. Hamas may have even assisted, in one way or another, this Israeli objective.”

Al-Habbash, the chief of the Palestinian Authority’s Sharia courts, is also PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ senior adviser on religious affairs and Islamic relations.

Other prominent PA officials and official PA media outlets have denied the mass-murders and rapes which occurred on October 7th, 2023.

“There is no evidence of what Israel spoke about,” reporter Ahed Farwaneh said on official PA-controlled television on October 16th, 2023.

A month later, Qadura Fares, Director of the PLO commission of prisoners’ affairs, appeared on official PA television to accuse Israel of carrying out the massacre of its own civiilans and soldiers.

“This whole outcry and this whole campaign against the Palestinian people is based on a lie, which it took Israel 24 hours to create and formulate properly. They killed their own civilians, and they committed all these crimes and burned the bodies, and they made up this story and said: ‘They [the Palestinians] raped, killed, and burned.’”