Israeli troops snatch injured gunmen from hospital beds

Israeli commandos snatched two wounded Palestinian gunmen from their West Bank hospital beds in a pre-dawn raid today.

It was the latest Israeli military operation to follow last week’s deadly bus bombing by the Hamas terror group in Jerusalem.

A doctor said the men were both members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militant group loosely affiliated with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction.

They were carried outside by the Israelis and driven away in military ambulances, he said.

The men – Othman Younis, 27, and Fahid Bani-Odeh, 25 – were taken to Israel’s Beilinson Hospital and were being treated for their injuries, Israeli military sources said later.

Israel accuses Younis of helping to plan several attacks in which at least 10 people were killed, including an August 12 suicide bombing which came in the midst of a ceasefire declared by the militant groups on June 29.

The truce collapsed last Thursday after Israel killed a top-ranking Hamas political leader in retaliation for the Jerusalem bus bombing a week ago, which killed 21 people, including several children.

Since the bombing, Israel has killed two senior Hamas members – and another five activists in the group – in missile strikes which marked the return of Israel’s policy of “targeted assassinations”.

Chief of Staff Lt Gen Moshe Yaalon has made it clear that all members of the militant group are now targets for “liquidation”.

The latest missile strike, on a Gaza beachfront late on Sunday, forced senior Hamas members to go into hiding, while the group’s spokesmen turned off their mobile phones to avoid giving away their positions.

Hamas leaders were also conspicuously absent from yesterday’s funerals for the four men killed in Sunday’s missile strike.

Hamas leaflets hung in mosques throughout the Gaza Strip instructed members to take precautions – such as not travelling in groups, avoiding use of their phones, using make-up to disguise themselves and staying off main streets – so as not to be easy targets for Israeli rockets.

Meanwhile, US-backed Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas – who is trying to implement the road map to Palestinian statehood – is also fighting off a campaign by Arafat to undermine him.

Arafat has appointed his former rival, Brig Gen Jibril Rajoub, to the vacant post of national security adviser. He is an adversary of Abbas and his security chief Mohammed Dahlan.