Jericho was first made famous by the Old Testament, when it describes how the Jewish leader Joshua circled around the city seven times, after which its walls collapsed.

More recently, it’s a major city in the West Bank, where mostly Arab Palestinians have had control, while Israeli forces man exits and entrances to this town in a valley well below sea level, and close to the trickle that these days is all that’s left of the River Jordan.

It’s also been the home of Saeb Erekat, often touted as a possible successor to the Palestinian Authority’s president Mahmoud Abbas. He died, aged 65, in an Israeli hospital this week, after being infected by Covid-19 while in Jericho. He had already undergone a lung transplant three years ago in the USA — and had suffered a heart attack.

I met Erekat several times, including in his Jericho home, and he always came across as a sincere but very frustrated person. His frustration stemmed from the pressures he felt from all sides. “People here in my city have warned me they want me dead,” he told me, “because they cannot see where these interminable talks between the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority were going”.

In fact the talks went nowhere – or somewhere that many Palestinians did not like.

He was suspected, by many of his people, to be ‘soft’ on Israel, especially after notes from informal meetings between the negotiating teams of Palestinians and Israelis were leaked to Al Jazeera in 2011. He appeared willing to make concessions that contradicted the public stance of the PA leadership.

Yet he supported a Palestinian Authority decision to cut off talks with Israel several years ago – and to boycott the United States peace efforts too after it recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city.

In recent months he firmly rejected any moves by Arab States, especially those in the Gulf, to make peace with Israel, demanding that the Palestinian Authority had a right to veto any such deal till it got a state of its own.

Using huge amounts of British government aid money, he established a strong propaganda arm, though, for the Authority. His Department for Negotiations Affairs put out a case for Palestinian statehood – based on a strongly-contested narrative of victimhood and on misleading maps.

Even in an arena where exaggeration is a speciality, Erekat excelled.

Early in 2002 Palestinian suicide bombers had killed over 100 Israelis (mostly civilians) in 35 days of carnage in various parts of the Jewish State. The Israelis decided to root out what they considered to be terrorist cells based in various cities and villages in the West Bank, where attacks were prepared with apparent impunity.

The Israeli assault on these targets centred on the northern West Bank cities of Jenin and Nablus. On April 11, Erekat told CNN’s Bill Hemmer that, “They are burying more than 300 Palestinian in Jenin refugee camp alone.” Ensconced in Jericho, Erekat then told several Western reporters by phone – including me – that at least 500 were dead in Jenin.

Six days later he tweaked the death toll further, this time to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, in a flurry of internal self-contradiction: “We have 1,600 missing men in this refugee camp. Mostly women and children, husbands and wives . . . How many people were massacred: We say the number will not be less than 500,” Erekat declared to CNN and other Western news outlets.

Very soon, even usually sober newspapers like The Times and broadcasters like the BBC were openly affirming that a massacre had taken place. The Times correspondent, who was interviewed by the BBC, compared it with the ‘massacre of Sabra and Shatila’, a genuine massacre of civilians that had occurred in Lebanon in 1982. (The killers in that event were all Christian Phalangists, but Israeli forces had control of the entrances to the two Palestinian refugee camps.)

The actual death toll in Jenin was 52 Palestinians and 23 Israelis – a United Nations report stated three months later. (See below)

Erekat’s wildly exaggerated claims had been contradicted within days, from a seemingly unlikely source. Erekat’s colleague, the governor of Jenin, Mousa Abu Mousa. This reporter filmed him looking over a list of the Palestinian dead. It contained only 50 names. The United Nations secretary-general decided to withdraw efforts for an on-the-spot inspection team to go there, but criticised Israel for being obstructive.

…….

Here, for the record, is an objective news agency account, published months later — far too late to have blunted the thrust of Erekat’s propaganda:

UN report rejects claims of Jenin massacre

AFP

Thursday 1 August 2002 16.00 BST

The Jenin incursion, which began in early April, was the heaviest fighting in Israel’s six-week campaign that began on March 29 this year. The Israeli army lost 23 soldiers in the camp and, in the weeks after the battle, the Palestinian cabinet minister, Saeb Erekat, said that 500 people had been killed.

The UN report, prepared by the secretary general, Kofi Annan, after Israel refused a fact-finding mission access to the camp, said 52 Palestinian deaths had been confirmed by April 18, and that up to half may have been civilians.

It called the Palestinian allegation “a figure that has not been substantiated in the light of evidence that has emerged”, the diplomats said.

Israel, which had repeatedly denied any massacre took place, praised the report. It had previously claimed that 22 Palestinian gunmen were killed in the fighting.

“Israel welcomes this finding, as well as the determination that the armed Palestinians deliberately took up position in a densely populated locality,” a spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, Jonathan Peled, said.

The violence in the camp came during an Israeli offensive in the West Bank, launched after a suicide bomb attack that killed 29 Israelis.