Israel on Sunday accused the Palestinian Authority of freeing three activists from the Hamas resistance movement, all of whom have been accused of involvement in past bomb attacks on the Jewish state.
“The Palestinian Authority released three Hamas members last week who were involved in the June suicide bombing that killed 21 people at a discotheque at the Tel Aviv Dolphinarium,” said a statement by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s office, cited by Haaretz newspaper.
The three men are Qassem Nazal, Ibrahim Dahmas and Rahman Daud from the area of Qalqilya in the northern West Bank, the statement said.
Israel claims that the PA did not interrogate the three and that they were jailed under loose security and in comfortable conditions.
According to the Shin Bet security service, Dahmas and Nazal were allegedly members of a “terror cell that included the suicide bomber from the Dolphinarium attack as well as a bomber that carried out an attack in Neveh Yamin.”
They also told the paper that Dahmas himself had plans to carry out a suicide bombing.
Daud, who assisted in the suicide bombing on a Dan bus in Tel Aviv in 1994, was released from an Israeli prison last year, and since then has become a part of the Hamas military headquarters base in Qalqilyah, they claimed.
Israel has killed nine Hamas activist since mid-July, intensifying its policy of "liquidation" of Palestinian resistance fighters suspected of carrying out attacks on Israel.
The Jewish state defends the tactic as a direct consequence of the Palestinian Authority's failure to crack down on anti-Israeli resistance fighters.
A suicide bomb attack Sunday afternoon on Haifa in northern Israel left 15 injured and the bomber dead – Albawaba.com
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