Israeli undercover troops snatched two wounded Palestinian gunmen from their West Bank hospital beds in a pre-dawn raid yesterday, the latest Israeli military operation in the wake of a deadly bus bombing a week ago.
The troops knocked on the door of the intensive care unit, imposed curfew on the patients and doctors and carried the two men, members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militant group loosely affiliated with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction -- out of the ward and into military ambulances, a doctor, who spoke on condition on anonymity, said.
The men -- Othman Younis, 27, and Fahid Bani-Odeh, 25 -- are in Israel's Beilinson Hospital and being treated for moderate injuries, military sources said.
Israel accuses Younis of helping to plan several attacks in which at least 10 people were killed, including an Aug. 12 suicide bombing which came in the midst of a ceasefire declared by the militant groups on June 29.
The truce collapsed last Thursday after Israel killed a top-ranking Hamas political leader in retaliation for a Jerusalem bus bombing a week ago in which 21 people were killed.
Since the bombing, Israel has killed two senior Hamas members -- and another five activists in the group -- in pinpoint missile strikes which marked the renewal of Israel's policy to hunt down and kill militants. Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon has made clear that all members of the militant group are targets for "liquidation."
The latest missile strike, on a Gaza beach front late Sunday, forced senior Hamas members to go into hiding, while the group's spokesmen turned off their phones. Hamas leaders were conspicuously absent from funerals Monday for the four men killed in Sunday's missile strike.
Hamas leaflets hung in mosques throughout the Gaza Strip instructed members to take precautions -- such as not traveling in groups, avoiding use of their telephones, using makeup to disguise themselves and staying off main streets -- so as not to be easy targets for Israeli "assassination."
Meanwhile, US-backed Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas -- who is trying to implement the so-called "road map" to Palestinian statehood -- is also fighting off a campaign by Yasser Arafat to undermine him and reassert his authority over Palestinian security forces.
Most recently, Arafat appointed his former rival, Brigadier General Jibril Rajoub, to the vacant post of national security adviser. It was not clear that Arafat planned to use Rajoub to rein in militants and unify his security forces, two central demands in the US-backed road map.
Although Arafat fired Rajoub from his job as West Bank security chief after a reportedly violent argument between the two in July last year, Rajoub is also an adversary of Abbas and his security chief Mohammed Dahlan.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell last week appealed in vain to Arafat to give Abbas full authority over security. But it appears Arafat hopes to undermine Abbas -- who he appointed to the post of prime minister in April after intense US pressure -- through Rajoub, who is also popular with Israel and the US and has participated in past peace talks.
Abbas has also been reluctant to crack down on militants, fearing it could spark civil war. He has appealed to Arafat to give him control of the key security branches, something he says is necessary to confront the militant groups.
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