Military expert, retired Colonel Hatem Karim Al-Falahi, said that the operation carried out by the military wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), today, Friday, near the Ariel settlement in the West Bank, falls within the context of “lone wolf” operations.
Al-Falahi explained – in his speech to Al-Jazeera – that this type of operation causes great concern to the Israeli security and intelligence services, especially in not stopping and preventing them, which is at the core of their tasks.
The military expert considered the operation’s perpetrator’s ability to deploy his weapons a “major success,” in parallel with his clashes with more than one side and his infliction of heavy human losses among Israelis, including soldiers.
The Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Hamas movement, announced on Friday that it had claimed responsibility for the ambush that targeted an occupation patrol and a bus near the Ariel settlement, and said that “the perpetrator was the martyr Samer Hussein, who surprised a number of Zionist soldiers inside a bus in Ariel, wounding 9, the wounds of 3 of whom were critical.”
Al-Qassam added, in a statement, that the extremist Israeli government will pay the price for its decisions targeting the West Bank with the blood of its soldiers.
Al-Falahi believed that the pace of these operations will increase in quantity and quality in the coming period, not only at the level of Israel. Rather, at the level of countries that participated in supporting Tel Aviv during the war on the Gaza Strip.
He attributed his prediction to the fact that the crimes of the occupation in Gaza made young people eager for revenge, stressing at the same time that the operation is not an act as much as it is a reaction to what is happening in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
For its part, the Israeli Broadcasting Authority said, “The perpetrator of the Ariel operation from the village of Ainbus, south of Nablus, was 46 years old. He managed to empty three bullet magazines into the bus before the army opened fire on him.”
The Israeli ambulance confirmed that 3 of the 9 injured were in serious condition, while Israeli media explained that there were wounded soldiers among those injured by the shooting, and that a police patrol was exposed to gunfire in that attack.
Operation Ariel comes in light of the occupation’s escalation of its military operations in the cities and camps of the West Bank, in addition to the escalation of settler attacks on Palestinians and their property with the continuation of the war in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023, which left tens of thousands martyred and wounded.