By Nidal al-Mughrabi
CAIRO (Reuters) – Israel has killed Abdel-Aziz Salha, a West Bank Hamas militant who had been jailed for life for taking part in the lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah in 2000 but later deported to Gaza in a prisoner swap, Hamas media and medics said.
Salha was killed in an Israeli airstrike on a tent inside Al-Aklouk School, which shelters displaced Palestinians, in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip earlier on Thursday, medics said.
There has been no immediate Israeli comment on Salha’s death and it was unclear if he had been deliberately targeted.
The 2000 killings took place in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where a mob set upon the two Israeli reservists who had been seized at a Palestinian checkpoint and taken to a police station, choking and beating them to death.
Salha was arrested by Israel in 2001 and sentenced to a lifetime in prison.
He was freed along with more than 1,000 other Palestinians in an October 2011 swap with Hamas for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had spent five years in captivity in Gaza.
SENIOR HAMAS OFFICIALS IDENTIFIED
Separately on Thursday, the Israeli military announced it had killed three senior Hamas officials in an airstrike that targeted them in Gaza three months ago.
It identified the three men as Rawhi Mushtaha, a confidant of Hamas Gaza chief Yehya Al-Sinwar, Sameh Al-Saraj, a senior security official and Sami Odeh, Hamas’s general security service commander.
”Mushtaha was involved in military decisions while also acting as the Head of Hamas Civil Governance in the Gaza Strip and holding the Prisoners Affairs Portfolio. He also formerly held the finance portfolio,” the military said.
There was no immediate comment from Hamas.
Gaza’s health ministry said Israeli military strikes killed 99 Palestinians across the territory in the past 24 hours.
Earlier on Thursday, an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City killed five Palestinians, while another airstrike on Nuseirat killed one man and wounded several others, medics said.
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip will mark the first anniversary of the war next week, with little hope of an end soon to the fighting, as Israel begins a ground offensive in Lebanon against Hamas’s Iranian-backed ally Hezbollah.
Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel almost a year ago, in support of Hamas in the war in Gaza, which started after the militant group staged the deadliest assault in Israel’s history on Oct. 7.
The assault, in which Israel says 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 taken hostage, triggered the war that has devastated Gaza, displacing most of its 2.3 million population and killing more than 41,600 people, according to Gaza health authorities.
(Reporting and writing by Nidal al-Mughrabi; Additional reporting by Ali Sawafta; Editing by Alex Richardson)
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