JERUSALEM — Israeli authorities have uncovered a network of Hamas militants suspected of involvement in a shooting that killed an Israeli man and wounded three others in the West Bank in June, Israeli security officials said Sunday.
Israel’s Shin Bet internal security agency said in a statement that the military and the police had arrested four Palestinians this month — three residents of the West Bank village of Silwad, and an older relative from the northern West Bank who is accused of aiding the group.
Two more Palestinians, including the man suspected of carrying out the shooting, have been detained by the Palestinian Authority’s security services, while the ringleader, a former resident of Silwad who was released from an Israeli prison in 2011 as part of an exchange for Gilad Shalit, a captive Israeli soldier, lives in Jordan, according to the statement.
Malakhi Rosenfeld, 26, a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was critically wounded in the attack on June 29 as he rode in a car with friends on the way back from a basketball match in a West Bank settlement. He died the next day of his wounds.
Hamas, the Islamic group that is a rival of the Palestinian Authority, won Palestinian legislative elections in 2006 and seized control of Gaza a year later, but has mostly been lying low in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in recent years. Over the last few weeks the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited control in parts of the West Bank, has arrested scores of local Hamas activists, accusing them of trying to undermine internal security and drag the area into conflict with Israel.
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(via NY Times)
