Ramallah, December 11 – Palestinian leaders are voicing regret that they left out beheading in the various conflicting descriptions of how Israeli soldiers killed a Palestinian official yesterday.

Ziab Abu Ein was taking part in a rock-throwing demonstration against Israel when a tear gas canister landed near him and he collapsed. An autopsy eventually revealed the cause of death a heart attack, but various Palestinian eyewitnesses described the fatality as resulting from a chokehold, beating, being struck by the canister, headbutting, or other direct acts by Israeli soldiers. Abu Ein had a chronic heart condition.

An official from President Mahmoud Abbas’s office apologized to Abu Ein’s family for neglecting to direct a full measure of libel at Israel for the death. “Every martyr deserves to have his death serve as the catalyst for uncompromising vitriol and accusations against Israel,” said Saeb Erekat. “In this case we unfortunately did not provide the full gamut of slanders, perhaps giving the impression that exploiting this death for propaganda was not done wholeheartedly, and we are sorry.”

President Abbas publicly decried the incident as “barbaric” as soon as word of Abu Ein’s death reached him, giving those initial efforts the same rhetorical support as the exploitation of other Palestinian deaths. But the lack of creativity in what accusations were leveled at Israel in the minutes and hours following the death generated the impression that the Palestinian Authority’s heart was not in it. Erekat said the president had ordered an investigation into the handling of the affair to determine which official neglected to perform his duties to the proper extent. The guilty party would be punished in such a way that could also be blamed directly on Israel.

Thursday morning Erekat also noted a controversial decision on the part of Palestinian and Jordanian pathologists to agree with Israel that the cause of death was a heart attack. “The leveraging of this event for propaganda could have been achieved more directly by simply contradicting the Israeli pathologist who was present at the autopsy,” he acknowledged, “and only time will tell whether it was the right move to opt for the alternative of blaming Israel for causing the heart attack instead of beheading, trauma, shooting, choking, stabbing, bludgeoning, infecting, bleeding, dismemberment, poisoning, vehicular assault, defenestration, slashing, immolation, electrocution, and drowning.”

At press time, Erekat was apologizing to the family for omitting mention of mauling.