Report: Haniyeh’s bodyguard was in cell that killed 5 IDF troops in 2014 Nahal Oz tunnel raid

Gianluca Pacchiani is the Arab affairs reporter for The Times of Israel

Palestinian media outlets report that the bodyguard of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh, killed with him in Tehran, was part of a terror squad that penetrated into Israel through a tunnel in July 2014 and fired an anti-tank missile at IDF forces in Nahal Oz, killing five soldiers.

According to Sama News and the Palestinian Media Center, Wasim Abu Shaaban was reportedly a member of the cell that carried out the attack during Operation Protective Edge.

Abu Shaaban was reportedly born in Gaza in 1988, studied sharia law at Gaza’s Islamic University, and was married with four children.

He is said to have begun his career in the terror group as an aide to former Hamas leader and Palestinian interior minister Said Siam, killed by Israel in 2009.

He was also reportedly a fighter in Hamas’s military wing, the Izz a-Din al-Qassam Brigades, where he rose to become deputy commander of a company in the Nukhba (elite unit) of Tel al-Hawa, in the southern part of Gaza City.

Abu Shaaban was later appointed to become a permanent member of the delegation accompanying Haniyeh as his bodyguard, after the latter left the Gaza Strip in 2019, the news outlets say.

A funeral ceremony for Haniyeh and Abu Shaaban is underway in the Iranian capital Tehran, before the two bodies are transferred to Qatar later today. In Doha, another ceremony will be held tomorrow in the country’s largest mosque before their final burial in Lusail, north of the capital Doha, in the same cemetery where the founder of the State of Qatar, Jassim bin Mohammed Al Thani, is interred.

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