NEW YORK- The FBI agents who were sent to Gaza to investigate the Palestinian Arab murders of three Americans are not receiving appropriate cooperation from the Palestinian Authority Security Services, according to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz (Oct.24, 2003)

The FBI “is unhappy with the level of cooperation” it received from the PA, Ha’aretz reports. The FBI agents have already returned to the United States.

This is not the first time that the PA has failed to facilitate the FBI’s investigations of Palestinian Arab murders of Americans.

* Israel Radio reported on April 13, 1995, that when FBI agents arrived in Israel to investigate the April 9, 1995 bombing that killed Alisa Flatow of West Orange, NJ, a 20 year-old Brandeis University junior, “Rashid Abu-Shibak, the deputy commander of the Palestinian security services in Gaza, announced that the U.S. investigators will not be allowed to conduct an investigation of their own.”

* The PA has refused to arrest and hand over Abd Al-Aziz Awda, whom the U.S. indicted in February 2003 as the founder and “spiritual leader” of an Islamic Jihad terror cell whose victims included Alisa Flatow of West Orange, NJ, a 20 year-old Brandeis University junior, who was murdered in a bombing near Kfar Darom on April 9, 1995; and Shoshana Ben-Yishai, 16, of Queens, NY, who was murdered in a shooting attack on a bus in Jerusalem on November 9, 2001. Awda is head of the Al Qassam Mosque in the PA-controlled Gaza Strip.

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said: “The Bush administration should not just take ‘no’ for an answer. We would certainly not accept such behavior by any other regime, and we should not accept it from the PA. The administration should send FBI agents to pursue and capture these Palestinian Arab murderers of Americans, and should use all means at its disposal including the $215-million in annual aid to the Palestinian Arabs to force the PA to cooperate in the capture of the murderers.”