Once again, Arab media is bringing up the centuries old “matzah blood libel”, that Jews use the blood of non-Jews to make matzah for Passover.

The blood libel originated in 1144 with the fabricated story of William of Norwich, England and is continuously used by Arabs. In the latest incident, the editor of Hamas's paper Al-Risalah, Wisam Afifa, associated the death of Mohammed Abu-Khder, the Palestinian Arab teen whose body was found on Wednesday in Jerusalem, with the blood libel.

The editorial was translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). In it, Afifa claimed that, just as the Jews once killed non-Jews to use their blood for matzahs, today they still engage in "sacred rites" of vengeance.

He further claimed that Israel has adopted the ideology of the Nazis, who distinguished between superior and inferior races.

"The settlers used the body of 17-year-old Mohammed Hussein Abu Khder, from Shuafat in northern Jerusalem, to carry out their sacred [act of] vengeance by torturing him and burning him to death, in a crime reminiscent of their holy matzos that became part of their history of betrayal and murder – for the culture of violence and blood grew among the Jews to such an extent that it seeped into their sacred rites and prayers,” he wrote..

"By holy matzos, I mean those matzos mixed with human blood, the blood of gentiles, namely of the non-Jewish other, [which they baked] to celebrate the Jewish holiday called Passover,” he continued.

“According to historical accounts, they used to murder Christians, preferably children under ten, collect their blood, and then hand it over to a rabbi, so he would mix it into the holiday matzos, and then serve them to the believers, to devour on their holiday.

"These ancient rites are echoed in modern ones, whereby [the Jews] sanctify the blood of [their fellow] Jews, who are considered humans of the first level, and disregard the blood of Palestinians. This obliges [Palestinian] President Mahmoud Abbas to define and classify the martyred boy Abu Khder, after he [Abbas] expressed his rage to the Muslim countries' foreign ministers [at the June 18, 2014 Jeddah conference] and said that the three settlers who had been kidnapped in the West Bank were human beings like us and we must search for them and return them, thus meeting [the Israeli] demand to endow these three settlers with a halo of divinity and of lofty humanity and describe them as 'exceptional human beings,” wrote Afifa.

"The unjust world – from the U.S. and the EU to the president of the Palestinian Authority – greatly lamented the death of the three settlers, but it does not lament the death of the Palestinian boy Abu Khdeir, since he belongs to the group whose blood is not [considered] sacred, according to the international community's classification of human, ethnic and political groups, which places Israel high on the ladder and the Palestinians low,” he charged.

“The international community's double standard regarding Israeli and Palestinian blood revives the heritage of the Nazi theory. The Jews, with their criminal behavior, adopt the vision of Hitler, which was based on classifying people into superior races, like the Aryan race, versus inferior races, like the blacks, Arabs and Jews, [and held that] the superiority of the white race over all other peoples entitles it to many absolute rights, such as the right to rule over other peoples,” said Afifa.

"Similarly, we see that Israel believes that the superiority of the Jewish race endows it with the absolute right to occupy, build settlements, take vengeance and spill blood. That is how they baked their sacred bread in the past, and that is how they hold their sacred rites of vengeance in the present, whose victim [this time] was the boy Abu Khder."

The remarks in the editorial ignore the fact that there are still many questions regarding who killed Abu Khder. While Israeli and international officials hastily concluded that Abu Khder was murdered by extremist Jews in revenge for the killing of three Israeli teenagers by terrorists, there have been reports that the abduction was carried out by Arabs and that the murder was an "honor killing" or another kind of criminal murder.

Another instance of an Arab media outlet perpetuating the blood libel was uncovered by MEMRI last year.

In that incident, the founder of the Egyptian Justice and Progress Party said in a televised interview, “It is well known that during the Passover, [the Jews] make matzos called the ‘Blood of Zion’. They take a Christian child, slit his throat and slaughter him. Then they take his blood and make their [matzos]. This is a very important rite for the Jews, which they never forgo.”

Asked by the interview whether the Jews do this to this day, Zaafrani replied, “Absolutely. The French kings and the Russian czars discovered this in the Jewish quarters. All the massacring of Jews that occurred in those countries were because they discovered that the Jews had kidnapped and slaughtered children, in order to make the Passover matzos.