Report: IDF undercover troops arrest relative of Ofra shooter
Palestinian media says soldiers nab Muhammad Maher Barghouti, whose family member Salih Omar Barghouti was killed Wednesday during an attempt to arrest him
Israeli undercover soldiers on Saturday night arrested a Palestinian with ties to the suspected terrorist in Sunday’s shooting attack outside the Ofra settlement, Palestinian media reported.
Palestinian reports said Muhammad Maher Barghouti was arrested in the West Bank village of Kobar, near Ramallah.
Barghouti is a relative of Salih Omar Barghouti, who was shot and killed Wednesday evening after he tried to attack troops while escaping arrest. Salih Barghouti, a Hamas member, is believed to have been behind a shooting outside Ofra Sunday in which seven people were wounded. That attack led to the death of a baby boy who was delivered prematurely after his mother was critically hurt in the attack.
There was no immediate Israeli confirmation of the arrest.
Barghouti came from a family with extensive terrorist ties, including a father and uncle who were convicted of murdering an Israeli soldier in 1978. The uncle, Nael Barghouti, is one of the longest-serving Palestinian prisoners in Israel’s history.
On Thursday a senior Israel Defense Forces commander indicated that the same Hamas terror cell carried out the Ofra shooting and a shooting outside the Givat Assaf outpost in which two IDF soldiers were killed and two other people were seriously injured.
Earlier Saturday the IDF demolished the family home of a Palestinian man charged with killing Israeli soldier Staff Sgt. Ronen Lubarsky earlier this year.
The IDF detonated explosives in the four-story building inhabited by the family of Islam Yousef Abu Hamid in the al-Am’ari refugee camp close to Ramallah.
Mahmoud Al-Aloul, deputy chairman of the Fatah party, expressed support for Hamid’s family and said the Palestinian Authority would pay for the home to be rebuilt, the Walla news site reported.
Hamid killed Staff Sgt. Ronen Lubarsky, a member of the elite Duvdevan unit, by dropping a marble slab on his head from a neighboring home during an IDF raid in May at the al-Am’ari refugee camp in Ramallah, according to the charge sheet.
Israel says the practice of demolishing terrorists’ homes is an effective means of discouraging future attacks, though it has been criticized by human rights groups as a form of collective punishment and by some analysts as an ineffective deterrent measure.
Also Saturday a Palestinian man who stabbed an Israeli soldier and hit him in the head with a rock Friday at a West Bank military post, seriously injuring him, turned himself in to Israeli security forces, Israel’s Shin Bet security agency said.
