A Middle Eastern news portal is reporting that Israeli security officials have announced that they have broken up a Hamas cell in the West Bank that was in the planning stages of a major terror attack. According to The Tower report, the cell was run by a Hamas operative in Qatar under the further command of Saleh al-Arouri, the Turkey-based head of Hamas operations in the West Bank:
July 1, 2015 by TheTower.org Staff The Shin Bet, Israel’s security intelligence service, announced today that it had broken up a Hamas-linked terror cell in the West Bank, The Times of Israel reported. The group was reportedly in the planning stages of a major terror attack. Though the arrests have been made over the past few months, an official announcement came today, during a recent increase in terror attacks that have claimed the lives of two young men, one of whom was buried today.
The terror group was run by a Hamas operative in Qatar, and consisted of about 40 members concentrated around the city of Nablus. During the arrests, the Shin Bet found around four million shekels in cash and gold, which the group had been selling to fund its operations.
The Shin Bet said the Nablus cells were run from Qatar, by Hussam Badran, a Hamas spokesperson and a native of Nablus.
Budran, operating under Saleh al-Arouri, the Turkey-based head of Hamas operations in the West Bank, sent messages to the operatives in Nablus via “email channels,” the Shin Bet said, apparently referring to non-direct messages, and laundered the money into gold jewelry transported into the West Bank from Jordan.
Anan Fatuah and Samih Aliwi, West Bank shop-owners, allegedly received cash from a Nablus couple that had traveled to Jordan for medical care but were, in fact, a forward unit of Hamas. The couple, Bassam and Mona Sayih, allegedly transferred the funds to Fatuah, who bought gold in Jordan and sold it along with Aliwi in their shop, funneling the money to Hamas operatives.
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In November 2014, the GMBDW reported that that Israel had arrested dozens of members of a Hamas terror network said to be funded and directed by Hamas officials in Turkey. In August 2014, the GMBDW was the first to report that that Salah al-Arouri, a Hamas military leader residing in Turkey, had admitted that the Hamas military wing was responsible for the kidnapping, an event which sparked the recent round of the Gaza conflict. Subsequent Israeli media reports say that Salah al-Aruri (aka Saleh al-Arouri), who is based in Turkey, was also the mastermind behind what has been described as a Hamas coup attempt in the West Bank that was intended to end the rule of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and spark a third intifada. False claims that the Israeli police had exculpated Hamas in connection with the crime were for a time a staple on websites linked to a or sympathetic to Hamas and/or the Muslim Brotherhood. We also reported in August 2014 that Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal had further confirmed that Hamas members were behind the West Bank killing of three Israeli teenagers.
The Hamas charter says that it is “one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine” and soon after Hamas took over the Gaza strip.
For more on Hamas, go here.