Israeli media is reporting that a senior Hamas official has threatened the kidnapping of more Israelis. According to a Jerusalem Post report:
April 17, 2015 In commemoration of Prisoners Day, Palestinians rallied in the the West Bank and Gaza on Thursday. The day is marked in solidarity with Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons.
‘We tell the Zionist enemy: you are all a target for us and the resistance, we will fight you until we finally get rid of you and take as many captives as possible to free our heroes,’ said Khalil al-Haya, a senior Hamas official in the coastal enclave, according to AFP.
‘Our men, our women, our children all envision kidnapping your soldiers and settlers, wherever they are,’ Haya told the gathered crowd. ‘And it is our right because we have no other way to free our heroes, and it is the Zionist enemy responsible for this state of affairs.’
Haya said Palestinian prisoners should ‘rest assured’ because militant groups led by Hamas’s military wing Izaddin al-Qassam Brigades ‘will release you as they did your brothers’ in 2011 when Israel released over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in return for the captive soldier Gilad Schalit.
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.”
For more on Hamas, go here.