The tragic death of three Palestinian siblings, killed in a fire that destroyed their house in the Gaza Strip on May 6, demonstrates yet again the depth to which Palestinian leaders will go to exploit their children for political purposes and narrow interests.

The three children from the Abu Hindi family — Mohamed, 3 years old, his brother Nasser, 2 years old and their two-month infant sister Rahaf, died in a fire caused by candles that were being used due to the recurring power outages in the Gaza Strip.

The electricity crisis in the Gaza Strip is the direct result of the continued power struggle between the two Palestinian rival forces, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA).

In recent months, the crisis has deepened, leaving large parts of the Gaza Strip without electricity for most of the day. Hamas blames the Palestinian Authority for the crisis because of its failure to cover the costs of the fuel needed to operate the power plants in the Gaza Strip. The PA has retorted by blaming Hamas’s “corruption” and “incompetence.”

The Abu Hindi family resides in the Shati refugee camp, where Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and other leaders of the Islamist movement live. But unlike the senior Hamas leaders, the Abu Hindi family could not afford to purchase their own power generator to supply them with electricity during the power outages. Instead, the tragedy-stricken family, like most families in the Gaza Strip, resorted to the cheapest alternative lighting method — candles.

On that horrific evening, the Abu Hindi’s three children went to sleep while the candles were burning. Hours later, the charred bodies of the three siblings were taken from the house while it was still on fire and engulfed with smoke.

In any other country, this incident would have been reported as a routine tragedy — one of the kind that could happen in any city such as New York, London or Paris.

Here, however, the death of the three children is not just another personal tragedy. This was a case, rather, of child sacrifice: the Abu-Hindu children were sacrificed on the altar of the decade-long war being waged between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. And these children are far from the first or last such victims.

In equal measure, the PA and Hamas are exploiting the tragedy of the Abu Hindi family to wage a smear campaign against each other. It is not as though these rivals have lived in harmony until now. But the political mud-slinging at the expense of the three dead children has reached repulsive levels.

The children were not even buried before Hamas leaders pointed their fingers at Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his prime minister, Rami Hamdallah, who it claimed were held personally responsible for the electricity crisis in the Gaza Strip.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri claimed that the electricity crisis was part of the PA leadership’s effort to keep the entire Gaza Strip under blockade. The PA’s ultimate goal, he explained, is to see Hamas undermined and removed from power in the Gaza Strip.

Other Hamas officials said the crisis was the direct result of the Palestinian Authority’s instance on imposing a tax on the fuel it supplies to the power plants in the Gaza Strip — a financial burden that Hamas could not afford to pay because of the already high cost of the fuel. They said that the tax was unjustified because the PA, through an arrangement with Israel (from which it purchases the fuel), gets the tax refunded. In addition, they pointed out, the PA has refused to file a request with Israel to increase its supply of electricity to the Gaza Strip.

Translation: Hamas takes no responsibility for the fact that two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip spend nearly 12 hours a day without electricity. Instead, in their view, it is the sole responsibility of Mahmoud Abbas and his prime minister, whose only interest is to strip Hamas of its power.

But where did the millions of internationally donated dollars go? How much do the tunnels cost, the ones Hamas uses to launch terrorist attacks against Israel? Funding terrorists and their families? Might not that money have been better invested in keeping children from burning to death from candle fire?

Hamas leaders staged the smear well. In an unprecedented move, masked members of Hamas’s military wing, Ezaddin Al-Qassam, were dispatched to attend the funeral of the three children. Hamas leaders such as Ismail Haniyeh were also present, offering condolences to the family. The cameras caught all this, demonstrating the family’s affiliation with Hamas and implying that Abbas and his Palestinian Authority were responsible for the tragedy.

Masked Hamas gunmen pose for the media at the funeral of the Abu Hindi children in Gaza, May 7, 2016.

The Palestinian Authority is also seeking to cash in on the tragedy by waging a war of defamation against Hamas. Yusuf Al-Mahmoud, spokesman for the Palestinian Authority government, dismissed the Hamas charges. “Those who continue to hijack the people of the Gaza Strip are responsible for this tragedy,” he said, referring to Gaza’s Hamas rulers. “The tragedy of the children in the Gaza Strip is the tragedy of all Palestinians. Hamas is responsible for the ongoing split (between the West Bank and Gaza Strip).” Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction has even gone as far as presenting the dead children’s grieving father as one of its own.

The Palestinian Authority is now hoping that the tragedy of the Abu Hindi family will push Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to revolt against Hamas.

Hamas is hoping that the tragedy will further undermine the credibility of the Palestinian Authority among Palestinians, shown as being complicit in the blockade on the Gaza Strip to prevent it from receiving weapons.

These charges and counter-charges constitute yet more proof that the PA and Hamas are determined to pursue their fight to the last Palestinian child.

Yet Abbas is trying to persuade the world to back his plan for establishing a sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It is hard to imagine how he will even be able to step foot in Gaza after this funeral.

What happened in the Abu Hindi home is an unspeakable family tragedy. What is happening to the Palestinian people, who have forever been led by leaders who care nothing for their well-being, is a tragedy of national proportions.

Khaled Abut Toameh, an award-winning journalist, is based in Jerusalem.

These are the days when everything is backwards. The “pro-Palestinian” activists on university campuses throughout the Western world have gotten into the spirit: Palestinian students and academics in the West Bank and Gaza Strip endure daily harassment by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas, because all that gets the activists going are “Israeli abuses.”

Apparently, today, to be “pro-Palestinian” one has to be “anti-Israel.”

For the self-appointed advocates of the Palestinians at Western university campuses, the Palestinian issue is nothing but a vehicle for spewing hatred toward Israel. In good, backwards form, Israel is castigated, and the PA and Hamas are free to abuse their own people.

It seems that in the view of the anti-Israel folks, the Palestinians should not even hope for human rights under the Palestinian regimes.

So while the anti-Israel activists are busy protesting against Israel on Western campuses, Palestinian students and professors are left to be persecuted by their own governments.

Instead of campaigning for reform and democracy in the West Bank and Gaza, these activists spend precious energy trying to take down Israel. The Palestinian students and academics are left to their own devices.

Palestinians living under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas suffer an abysmal level of freedom of expression — and always have. This is the grim reality that the international community and protesting students prefer to ignore. For them, human rights violations must have a “made in Israel” sticker on them.

Here is a suggestion: Let us redefine “pro-Palestinian.” Instead of bashing Israel, the real pro-Palestinians will reveal themselves by demanding democracy for those they champion. True pro-Palestinian activists will scream for public freedoms for the Palestinians under the PA and Hamas regimes, which have always smashed dissent with an iron fist.

In the past few days, Palestinians on campuses in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have once again been reminded that they remain as far as ever from achieving a state that would look any different from the other Arab dictatorships in the region. The campus incidents, which have hardly caught the attention of the international media and anti-Israel activists in the West, also expose the media double standard about human rights violations in the territories.

In the most recent case, Hamas security guards detained a number of students at Palestine University in the Gaza Strip who protested against the administration’s refusal to allow them to sit for examinations because they had not paid tuition in full.

The students complained that the guards conducted “humiliating” body searches and confiscated their mobile phones. Some said they were physically assaulted.

In another high-profile incident in the Gaza Strip last week, The Islamic University suspended UK-educated Professor Salah Jadallah for criticizing Hamas and the university administration on Facebook. The move drew sharp condemnation from many Palestinian students and academics, who took to social media to voice their fury over the suspension.

Professor Jadallah’s suspension is far from unusual in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, where students, journalists and social media activists have repeatedly fallen victim to the Islamist movement’s harsh clampdowns.

A founder of Hamas in northern Gaza, Professor Jadallah was until recently considered within Hamas’s inner circle. His scathing remarks on Hamas, which he posted on his Facebook page, have turned him into a persona non grata on campus and he is being treated as a “fifth column” by his erstwhile Hamas colleagues. Professor Jadallah is being targeted: what, one might ask, is happening to ordinary Palestinians?

Campuses in the West Bank are faring no better. The Palestinian Authority’s security forces systematically target students and academics under various pretexts. Hundreds of students have been rounded up by these security forces in recent years as part of a crackdown on critics and Hamas “supporters.” Many of the students remain in detention without the possibility of seeing a lawyer or a family member.

Just this week, Palestinian security forces arrested four more university students and teachers: Izaddin Zaitwai, Ehab Ashour, Zuhdi Kawarik and Awni Fares.

It is not only political critics of the PA and Hamas, however, who are of interest to the security forces in Palestinian regimes.

In the first case of its kind under the Palestinian Authority, the Kadoori University in Tulkarem suspended a student who hugged his fiancée in public after offering her a wedding ring. The student, whose identity was not revealed, was accused of “immodest conduct” and is facing a disciplinary hearing. A university spokesman accused the “hugging” student of “slandering” the university’s reputation and defended the punishment.

Left: Hamas supporters are shown in a video screenshot marching during a student council election rally at Bir Zeit University, near Ramallah, on April 20, 2015. Right: Kadoori University in Tulkarem this month suspended a student who hugged his fiancé in public. The student was accused of “immodest conduct” and is facing a disciplinary hearing.

The decision to suspend the student sparked a social media storm, with many Palestinians accusing the Palestinian Authority and Kadoori University of seeking to be “more Hamas than Hamas.”

If the putative champions of the Palestinians in the West continue to disregard the trampling of Palestinian human rights by the PA and Hamas, there may not be any Palestinians left to champion.

Khaled Abu Toameh, an award-winning journalist, is based in Jerusalem.