On Thursday, Times of Israel reporter Avi Issacharoff quoted an unnamed Israeli security official blaming Saleh al-Arouri, a Hamas operative now living in Turkey, for orchestrating the kidnappings last week of Naftali Fraenkel, Gil-ad Shaer and Eyal Yifrach.
According to the unnamed official, Saleh al-Arouri — a former West Bank resident deported from the region after serving a prison sentence in Israel for several years, who is now a leading figure in Hamas overseas operations — is thought to have been a key figure for years in attempts to initiate terror attacks in the West Bank, funding and arranging the training of terror cells.
The official claimed al-Arouri, who used to live in a village north of Ramallah, has urged West Bank operatives incessantly to set up terror cells and perpetrate kidnappings. Al-Arouri has financially sponsored these cells, which were trained and directed to abduct Israelis. Often that money was transferred through charities to obfuscate their real destination, the would-be kidnappers, the official said.
The official acknowledges that he has no “‘smoking gun’ proving al-Arouri’s involvement,” but has “no doubt that al-Arouri was connected to the act.” This is consistent with the growing belief among Israeli security services that the kidnappings were orchestrated by Hamas’s foreign leadership. According Issacharoff’s source “dozens of al-Arouri’s emissaries have visited the West Bank” and that “several” were arrested but others were able to leave having accomplished their tasks.
In a report earlier this year about al-Arouri’s involvement in West Bank terror, IDF Gen. Tamir Yadai said, “I’m happy to say that we’ve managed to foil all of these attempts, and once we obtain information about an effort to organize and attempt an attack, we immediately act,” but that “I don’t delude myself into thinking that we always know everything.”
Al-Arouri was released from an Israeli jail in early 2010, and was reported to be in “sole control of the movement’s [Hamas’s] activities in the West Bank” last year.
[Source: Arouri222 / YouTube ]