In a pre-dawn invasion of the West Bank city of Ramallah, Israeli forces apparently found the body of an Israeli settler abducted on Monday, having been tipped off as to the location of the body by an arrested Palestinian fighter. The Nasser Salahuddin Brigades, armed wing of the Palestinian Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) claim to have killed the settler due to the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza.
On Tuesday and again on Wednesday, the Brigades sent out warnings that the settler would be killed if the massive assault by Israeli forces did not cease. The Israeli attacks did not cease, but were escalated last night with the arrests of 87 Palestinian parliament members, officials and Government ministers, and the abducted settler was found shot to death at dawn Thursday morning.
They said that large numbers of IOF troops at 0400 am Thursday removed the body of the settler, hailing from Itmar settlement, from the area.
Soldiers arrested a Palestinian in connection with the killing early Thursday morning.
On Wednesday morning, a PRC spokesman, displaying Asheri’s Israeli identification card, told Al-Jazeera satellite TV that the settler would be "butchered in front of TV cameras" if doesn’t halt its incursion in the Gaza Strip, which began in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
He said that the kidnapping of the settler was part of an operation called Rider’s Rage, carried out by members of the Abu Yusef al-Guga and Abu al-Ataya Samhadane Brigades, a group named after two PRC leaders killed in Israeli attacks.
"Our operatives succeeded in following the kidnapped person on his way between the settlement of Itamar and Beitar Ilit," the spokesman said.
Initial reports indicated that Asheri set out Sunday evening to hitchhike from the settlement of Beitar Illit, southwest of Bethlehem, in the direction of the Neveh Tzuf settlement, northwest of Ramallah, where he was completing a course. All of the Israeli settlements are illegal under international law, and the transfer of civilian populations into militarily-occupied land is also illegal, and creates a situation whereby those civilian populations can arguably be seen as combatants, according to the statutes of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
The PRC spokesman in Gaza first announced that the group had carried out a kidnapping at around 10 P.M. Monday.
Meanwhile, a leaflet distributed Wednesday by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the armed wing of the Fateh party, claimed that a 62-year-old Rishon Letzion resident also had been abducted and was being held in the West Bank.
