Israel's failed prisoner release policies

It took the Israeli Shin Bet only three weeks to arrest the members of a terrorist cell suspected of having carried out the June 30 attack near the Alon Shvut settlement in which Malachi Rosenfeld from the settlement of Kochav Hashahar was murdered and three others were wounded. It was apparently also that same cell that fired shots at an Israeli ambulance in the area of the West Bank Beit El settlement two days earlier.

When the members of the cell were arrested, two facts came to light, pointing to Hamas’ current modus operandi in the West Bank. The first one is that the fingerprints of Salah al-Arouri, who set up a Hamas headquarters in Istanbul, are repeatedly present. The second one is the current involvement of many prisoners released in the 2011 Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange deal, who have resumed their terrorist activities under Arouri’s baton.

The person who directed the cell that mounted the terror attack at Alon Shvut is Ahmed Najar. As a condition for his release in the Shalit deal, Najar was deported to the Gaza Strip. He later moved to Jordan and since then has been plotting terrorist attacks across the West Bank. Incidentally, two of his relatives — his brother Amjad from the neighborhood of Silwad in Jerusalem and his father-in-law, Jamal Yunis — were two of the operatives in that cell who were remunerated for their willing participation.

The arrest of the cell, among other things, exposed the close and effective cooperation between Israel’s security forces and their Palestinian counterparts. Unlike in the past, the Shin Bet publicly disclosed this security cooperation. According to the Shin Bet, some of the cell’s operatives were apprehended by the Palestinian security forces, chief among them the leader of the cell, Mu’ad Hamed, who was the one who fired the shots. Over the past month, the Palestinians have rounded up some 250 Hamas militants in the West Bank in the aftermath of a series of terrorist attacks against Israel at the end of June.