A Palestinian, said to have participated in the lynching of two Israeli soldiers in West Bank's Ramallah 24 years ago, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, according to Israeli media reports. Aziz Salha became infamous after he was photographed waving his hands that were covered in the blood of two IDF reserved soldiers that he and others lynched.
The brutal lynching that shocked Israel happened in the first weeks of the Second Palestinian uprising, or Intifada, in October 2000. Reservist soldiers Yosef Avrahami and Vadim Norzhic accidentally took a wrong turn and ended up in the Palestinian Authority-controlled city of Ramallah in the West Bank. Though the Palestinian officials detained the men and took them to the nearby police station, a group of Palestinians, who were part of a passing funeral marchers, broke into a police station. This happened after rumours spread that Israeli undercover agents were being detained at the police station, prompting a crowd of over 1,000 to gather, calling for their deaths.
They beat and stabbed the soldiers to death before mutilating their bodies. Salha's image of displaying his bloodied hands had defined the violence between Israel and Palestine.
However, it is unclear as to whether Salha was specifically targeted or accidentally killed in an airstrike in the centre of the strip.
Though Salha was later captured by Israel and sentenced to prison in 2004 for his role in the murder, he was released seven years later in a prison exchange deal. Salha was exchanged for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier kidnapped and held by Hamas in Gaza. Besides Salha, another perpetrator of the lynching was Nasser Abu Hamid, who died from cancer in December 2022.
Meanwhile, Israel continues to strike Hamas command centres in Gaza. IAF fighter jets struck a school that was no longer used, killing some 20 people on Wednesday. The military said that two of the command centres were located in schools and a third was embedded in a compound in central Gaza that had previously served as the Nuseirat Girls’ School.
Israel accuses Hamas of using schools as a base to plan and carry out attacks against Israel.