IDF eliminates top terror leader in Samaria strike

Amed Abdullah Abu Shalal had coordinated many attacks on soldiers and civilians over the last year.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The IDF and Shabak announced Wednesday that they had successfully eliminated a top Palestinian terror leader near Nablus (Shechem) in a drone strike.

Amed Abdullah Abu Shalal had been traveling in a car with two accomplices in the Balata refugee camp around 4 AM. In a video provided by the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, the car can be seen going along a deserted street when a missile strikes it and the vehicle explodes.

According to the statement, Abu Shalal was the head of the terrorist infrastructure of the so-called camp, which is basically a suburb of Nablus, and was planning a large and “imminent attack” at the time of his assassination.

The terror chief had already been responsible for numerous attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians over the past year. These included a shooting in eastern Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah (Shimon Hatzaddik) neighborhood that injured two Israelis last April, and a bombing last October directed against IDF troops in which one soldier was wounded.

Israel’s internal intelligence agency believes that Abu Shalal’s group was being supported financially by Iran and ran under its direction, as part of Tehran’s coordination of terrorist proxies surrounding the Jewish state as well as around the world.

These include groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is second to Hamas in the Gaza Strip and participated in the October 7, 2023 invasion and slaughter of 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals that sparked the ongoing war in the coastal enclave. Its terrorists kidnapped at least a few of the some 250 people taken forcibly into Gaza that day, whose fate is still unknown.

This is the second targeted killing of senior terrorists in Balata in the last two months. In mid-November, an Israeli jet bombed “a hideout apartment” where terrorists planned attacks  against “Israeli citizens and military targets in the immediate future,” the IDF and Shabak said in a statement at the time.

Five members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade were killed in the precision strike, including its leader, Mahmoud A-Zufi, who was on the IDF’s “Most Wanted” list. According to the statement, he “formed a terrorist squad consisting of the camp’s youth who armed themselves with explosives and weapons for the purpose of terrorist operations against IDF forces entering the camp.”

A-Zufi also sent out men to carry out shooting attacks against Israeli soldiers besides participating in such assaults himself, and had begun manufacturing bombs.

The Brigade is the military arm of Fatah, the largest Palestinian faction, whose head, Mahmoud Abbas, is the president of the Palestinian Authority.