Ahmed al-Jaabari (right) alongside Hamas political chief, Khaled Meshaal
The Guardian reports: Ahmed al-Jaabari, the operational commander of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, kept largely out of the limelight.
Blamed by Israel for being the captor-in-chief of the kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2006, he confirmed that role by escorting Shalit to the handover when he was finally released last year.
Jaabari was also heavily involved in the negotiations between Israel and Hamas for the soldier’s release, hosted by Egypt.
Jaabari, 52, was killed on Wednesday along with an unnamed associate when their car was blown apart by an Israeli missile. Palestinians said nine people were killed, including a seven-year-old girl.
Video from Gaza showed the charred and mangled wreckage of a car belching flames, as emergency crews picked up what appeared to be body parts.
Born in the Shujiya area of Gaza City in 1960, Jaabari came from a noted activist family and studied history at Gaza’s Islamic University.
Originally a member of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, he was imprisoned in 1982 where he first encountered some of the founding figures of Hamas, including Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, who would also be killed in an Israeli attack. [Continue reading…]
IDF Chief of Staff once remarked that “the Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.” Yet under the guise of defending themselves (from a defeated people) such assassinations are more than legitimate in God’s chosen’s eyes and the Pentagon. One may ask, General Chief of the IDF, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. President Obama and US Pentagon spokesman, with Arthur Silber, “when will people fully to grasp and understand, to feel all the way to the deepest part of their being, the unique, inestimable value of the life of even one human being?”