BEIT AWWA, West Bank: Israeli forces on Monday killed a wanted Hamas insurgent in a hail of gunfire after surrounding a house in the southern West Bank where he was holed up, security forces said.
A team comprised of border police, soldiers and members of the Shin Bet domestic intelligence "eliminated Ali Suweiti," a border police spokesman said.
The army said the force surrounded the house in Beit Awwa where Suweiti had holed up and urged him to surrender. He refused "and opened fire at the forces" who returned fire, the army said in a statement.
"The terrorist continued to fire at the force, and was ultimately killed."
Palestinian witnesses said the house was demolished during the operation and that three relatives of its owner were arrested by Israeli forces.
The body was later carried through the streets at a funeral march attended by thousands of protestors waving green Hamas banners and calling on its armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, to take revenge.
The army said Suweiti, in his 40s, had carried out five shooting attacks and a bombing between 1999 and 2004, killing a border policeman in the West Bank in one of the shootings in April 2004.
Hamas, an armed Islamist group sworn to the destruction of Israel, has carried out scores of deadly attacks in the last two decades and is blacklisted as a terrorist organization by Israel and the West.
The group, which rules the Gaza Strip, blamed Monday’s operation on Israel and security forces loyal to the Western-backed Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, calling it the "repulsive fruit of security coordination."
"The assassination of this Qassam commander is a dangerous crime, which comes in the context of the occupation’s determination to eliminate the forces of the resistance, and especially the Qassam Brigades in the West Bank," Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said.
"The martyr was targeted by Abbas’s forces, just as he was targeted by the Zionist occupation," he added in a statement from the group’s Gaza enclave.
Hamas seized power in Gaza in June 2007 after routing Abbas’s forces in a week of bloody street battles, limiting his authority to the occupied West Bank and cleaving the Palestinians into hostile rival camps.
Since then both Palestinian factions have accused their rivals of arresting scores of their members for political reasons, and Hamas has charged the Palestinian Authority with allying with Israel against it in the West Bank.
Authorities in the West Bank and Gaza have said they only arrest those who pose a security threat, but international and Palestinian rights groups have accused both governments of political arrests and mistreatment of detainees.
