A Palestinian engineer whom Hamas claimed worked for them, was shot and killed by unknown assailants in Malaysia where he taught, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.
Hamas, the terrorist organization that exercises complete political and military control over the Gaza Strip blamed Israel for killing Fadi al-Batsh, who was described by the terrorist group’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, as a member of Hamas with “an honorable reputation in science.”
A spokesman for the Israeli government didn’t comment on the killing, however on Sunday Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said on Israel Radio that Batsh was “no saint” and suggested that his killing was the result of “a settling of scores among terrorist organizations.”
In a mourning tent that displayed a sign reading, “Qassam Brigades mourns its martyred leader. The engineer Fadi Mohammed al-Batsh.”
The Izz al-din Qassem Brigades are the active terrorists in Hamas and members of the group attended the public mourning. Despite the presence of the terror group at the mourning tent, Batsh’s father denied that his son was a member of Hamas.
Batsh, who was a senior lecturer at the University of Kuala Lumpur, was shot on his to a mosque for dawn prayers by a helmeted man on a motorcycle. In 2014 he had published a paper on how to make power sources for aerial vehicles more reliable.
Malaysian authorities blamed the killing on Europeans who were tied to a foreign intelligence agency.
Hamas, according to Israeli analysts, may be turning to drones to carry out attacks, because Israel has developed countermeasures to both its rocket arsenal and its terror tunnels.
“Since Israel has successfully developed defense systems against the rockets and the missiles and…new technological regarding terror tunnels, Hamas was left almost with nothing,” said Kobi Michael, a researcher at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. Michael said that a drone packed with explosives could fly lower than a rocket and possibly evade Israeli defenses, such as Iron Dome.
Hamas accused Israel of the 2016 killing of Mohamad Zawari, who was said to be the head of the terror group’s “air force.” Zawari was credited with building 30 drones ahead of Hamas’s 2008 war with Israel.
In February of last year, the IDF shot down a Hamas drone that approached Israeli airspace. In September 2016, the IDF intercepted a drone heading for Israeli territory, while a UAV crashed close to the Gaza border fence three months earlier. In 2016, Israeli authorities thwarted an attempt to smuggle drone models and disassembled drone parts into Gaza via the postal system. Drones were also launched from Gaza during Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014.
A number of other high-ranking Hamas officials have been killed in recent years. Mazen Faqha, who had been convicted of killing nine Israelis in a 2002 terror attack, was killed in March 2017.
While it is true that Israel has been credited with taking out many Palestinian terrorists over the years, Hamas’s Gaza leader Yahye Sinwar himself was implicated in orchestrating the execution in 2016 of Mahmoud Ishtiwi, a senior figure in the al-Qassam Brigades.
[Photo: The Star Online / YouTube ]