Israel media pins targeting of Palestinian engineer on Mossad

Israeli media and journalists have said that Israel’s intelligence services Mossad carried out the assassination of Palestinian engineer Fadi Al-Batsh in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday, Quds Press reported yesterday.

Military analyst in Israel Hayom, Yoav Limor, said: “It is natural to attribute the assassination of Fadi Al-Batsh to Mossad. The target is an engineer who worked for Hamas,” noting that the way the assassination was carried out was similar to previous Mossad missions.

He said that this was how the founder of the Islamic Jihad Fathi Al-Shiqaqi was assassinated in 1995 in Morocco and how many Iranian nuclear scholars met their end.

Ronen Bergman, an Israeli investigative journalist, author and senior political and military analyst for Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, said the assassination was likely to have been a global intelligence effort with scores of well-trained intelligent and professional agents taking part.

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Israel would target Al-Batsh because he had knowledge that could help Hamas develop weapons, he explained.

On Twitter, he clearly wrote that the Mossad assassinated the engineer because he was part of a secret Hamas unit that worked to develop its weapons.

The #Mossad assassinated Fadi M. Albatsh, 35, in Kuala Lumpur, this morning. A member of the military wing of #Hamas he was part of one of the most secret unit that dealt with the development of advanced weapons for the organization. https://t.co/faY254DGbl. More- soon

— Ronen Bergman (@ronenbergman) April 21, 2018

Yossi Melman, an Israeli journalist and writer who specialises in security and intelligence affairs, wrote in Maariv that Al-Batsh was part of Hamas’ research and development unit before leaving to Malaysia.

He claimed that his knowledge could have served Hamas to develop its weapons, including drones, tunnels and under underwater units.

Melman said this assassination and other carried out by Mossad all used motorcycles.

Read: Israel dismisses suggestions it killed Palestinian in Malaysia