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Dozens of Hamas Operatives Arrested in West Bank for Plotting Terror Attacks

by TheTower.org Staff |

Reports emerged Friday morning that at least 30 Hamas members had been arrested in the West Bank in recent weeks for planning a series of terror attacks against Israeli targets. Senior Palestinian officials told veteran Arab affairs correspondent Avi Issacharoff that the expansive West Bank network was both funded and directed by Hamas officials operating out of Turkey, including Saleh al-Arouri, who had been put in sole control of Hamas’s West Bank terror infrastructure. Per Issacharoff, the Palestinian officials “accused Turkey as well as Qatar— the current home of Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal — of enabling Hamas to operate freely within their territories.”

Turkey experts, including Foundation for Defense of Democracies Vice President for Research Jonathan Schanzer, was not surprised at the idea that Turkey was harboring terrorists who were overseeing plots against Israeli targets:

The West Bank plot is not the first this year to be linked to Arouri – Israeli security officials had also connected him to the June abduction and murder of three Israeli teenagers by Hamas terrorists – part of a violent escalation in the West Bank that ran in parallel to the rocket and tunnel escalation out of the Gaza Strip. The arrests come just months after an announcement by officials from Israel’s Shin Bet security agency that they had uprooted a Hamas plot – involving terror cells spread across more than 40 Palestinian communities, and also masterminded by Arouri – to trigger a wave of violence that would destabilize the region, derail Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation, and pull off a military coup that would see the U.S.-backed Fatah faction supplanted in the West Bank by Hamas. In late May a Hamas operative, who was arrested, told the Shin Bet how the terror organization hires young men to riot against a Jewish presence on the Temple Mount.

Hours after the report was published, two young Jewish men were injured in  what the Jerusalem Post described as “a brawl [that] broke out between a group of Jewish worshipers – en route to a yeshiva – and Arab youths.” The two men were taken to a local hospital for treatment.

[Photo: Press TV News Videos / YouTube]

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