The leading Palestinian terrorist and participant in the Ramallah Lynching in 2000 died in an Israeli hospital while serving multiple life sentences.
Nasser Abu Hamid, who co-founded the terrorist group Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades (AAMB), died on Tuesday morning of lung cancer, Israeli media reports confirm.
In 2002, Abu Hamid was apprehended and brought before an Israeli court. He confessed to murdering seven Israelis and is suspected of taking many more lives. Besides carrying out several deadly terrorist attacks, he participated in the Ramallah Lynching, where two unarmed Israeli soldiers were tortured and killed by a Palestinian mob in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
The death of the leading terrorist figure appears to have caused great rage and anguish among Palestinians, with Palestinian groups organizing protests and strikes in the West Bank and Gaza.
“Shopkeepers in Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron and Bethlehem closed their businesses on Tuesday, AFP correspondents said, while schools sent students home and protesters gathered in several areas of the West Bank,” the TV channel France24 reported. “A demonstration was also held in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, an AFP photographer reported.”
The Palestinian Authority, which administers the West Bank, is officially mourning the death of the convicted murderer and terrorist. “Palestinian prime minister Mohammed Shtayyeh said he was mourning Abu Hamid’s death ‘in the name of the government and our Palestinian people,'” the French broadcaster added.
The Jerusalem Post confirmed the terrorist’s death:
Palestinian terrorist Nasser Abu Hamid, a founder of Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade who murdered seven Israelis and participated in the infamous Ramallah lynch in 2000, died from cancer on Tuesday morning in an Israeli prison hospital.The Israel Prison Service confirmed that Abu Hamid died while hospitalized at Yitzhak Shamir Medical Center. He was imprisoned multiple times on terrorism charges and was sentenced to a life sentence for the deadly terrorist attacks he conducted and organized.Abu Hamid took part in the Ramallah Lynch in 2000 and murdered three Israelis in shooting attacks that same year. He also planned and directed three terrorist attacks in 2002 and was imprisoned on a life sentence later that year. (…)The Fatah movement announced a comprehensive strike in the Ramallah governorate on Tuesday after Abu Hamid’s death. Days of mourning and strikes were announced in additional Palestinian cities, towns and universities on Tuesday.Palestinian prisoners announced that they would protest in light of the death as well. Palestinian factions in Jerusalem called for a march at the Damascus Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem on Tuesday evening in response to Abu Hamid’s death.
The gruesome Ramallah Lynching occurred on October 12, 2000, when two IDF reservist soldiers took a wrong turn to their base and ended up in a Palestinian-controlled area.
First Corporal Yosef Avrahami and First Sargent Vadim Norzhich, both aged 33, mistakenly entered the Palestinian city of Ramallah and were arrested by the local police. The two men were taken to the city’s police headquarters, where they were beaten and killed by a frenzied mob amid chants of “Allahu Akbar.”
A “mob of Palestinians stormed the building and tortured the soldiers to death, mutilating and defiling their bodies beyond recognition,” an official Israeli report later noted.
Detailing some of Abu Hamid’s crimes, the news agency Jewish News Syndicate reported Tuesday:
According to the Almagor Terror Victims Association, on Oct. 12. 2000, Abu Hamid was photographed taking part in the desecration of the bodies of IDF reservists Vadim Nurzhitz and Yossi Avrahami during the Ramallah Lynching; on Dec. 21, 2000, he murdered Eli Cohen in a shooting attack near Giv’at Ze’ev; and on Dec. 31, 2000, he murdered Rabbi Binyamin and Talya Kahane in a shooting attack near Ofra.Also according to Almagor, he planned the February 2002 attack in Jerusalem’s Neveh Ya’acov neighborhood in which policewoman Galit Arbiv was murdered and 10 civilians were wounded; directed the February 2002 murder of Gadi Rejwan in the Atarot industrial zone in Jerusalem; and was responsible for the March 2002 bombing at the Seafood Market restaurant in Tel Aviv, murdering three Israelis—Eliyahu Dahan, Yossi Habi and policeman Salim Barakat—and wounding 31.
Inclination towards terrorism appears to run in the Abu Hamid family. “Five of Abu Hamid’s brothers have spent time in Israeli prisons for their role in the violence, while another brother was killed in 1994 in clashes with Israeli forces,” France24 reported.
Meanwhile, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades (AAMB) terrorist group he helped create during the ‘Second Intifada’ terror wave in 2000 continues to grow in strength and wage a campaign of terror against Israeli civilians and soldiers.
The West Bank-based AAMB is responsible for some of the recent deadly terrorist attacks inside Israel. “During the last few months an increasing number of ‘brigades’ have appeared in Judea and Samaria, military-terrorist networks calling themselves al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades (AAMB),” the Israeli national security thinktank, Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, disclosed in a report released in October. “They attack the Israeli security forces and civilians in Judea, Samaria and inside Israeli territory,” the statement added.
The AAMB has close ties to the PLO-controlled Palestinian Authority, which rules over the West Bank. According to the think tank’s report, some of the terror group’s operatives “are high-ranking officers in the PA’s security forces.”
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