IDF forces of the Southern Command are on high alert, expecting a Hamas retaliation against Israel for the Friday assassination of Hamas senior military commander Mazen Fuqaha, Israel Radio reported Sunday.
Although no one has accepted responsibility for the assassination, carried out by gunmen who shot Mazen Fuqaha in the head outside his home, using silencers, Hamas and other Arab terror groups in Gaza have been blaming Israel.
Fuqaha, who was released from Israeli security prison by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the 2011 Gilad Shalit deal, has been coordinating the Hamas cells in Judea and Samaria.
According to Fuqaha’s father, a resident of the Tubas village in Samaria, Israel had tried for a long time to get his son to retire from his career as terrorist. “Intelligence officers came to our house three times and told us Mazan should stop his anti-Israeli activity,” the father told Walla.
Fuqaha’s father recalled the tense meetings with those Intelligence officers: “they would come, sit with us and talk about Mazan. They told me Mazan was wrong, and that as his father I should advise him to stop. I told them: You exiled him to Gaza, what can I do?”
At one such visit, an IDF officer asked the father to call his son, and the two spoke. According to the father, Fuqaha told the officer: “My parents are old, don’t bother them. If you’re a man, come see me in Gaza, that’s where I am.”
So they did.