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Israeli forces disguised as vegetable vendors capture senior Hamas militant

Photo: This undated picture provided by the family shows 14-year-old Palestinian Sariel al Jitan, from the Balata refugee camp, adjacent to the West Bank town of Nablus. The Israeli army said Wednesday it arrested the boy who allegedly was recruited by militants to carry out a suicide bombing against his will, the latest in a string of attempted attacks involving Palestinian youths.

HEBRON, West Bank- Israeli forces disguised as vegetable vendors captured a senior Hamas operative who had been on the run for eight years as well as a 14-year-old boy whom militants tried to push into becoming a suicide bomber, the army said Wednesday. The arrest sweep came as a Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia announced that the official investigation into Yasser Arafat's death failed to determine what killed the longtime Palestinian leader. Arafat died in a French hospital on Nov. 11 after his health rapidly declined, and the cause of death has remained a mystery. His wife, Suha, refused an autopsy. The report issued Wednesday by a special ministerial committee that investigated the death said it was "the result of deep bleeding in the brain." However, doctors could not determine the initial source of his ailment, the report said. "French and Palestinian doctors who treated the martyred brother found that medicine could not find the disease which infected Arafat, neither viruses, nor germs, nor AIDS, nor bacteria," Qureia said. Also Wednesday, gunmen in the Gaza Strip town of Khan Younis chased down a car carrying two foreign journalists and briefly abducted the men. Dion Nissenbaum, an American reporter for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, and British photographer Adam Pletts, who was working on contract for Knight Ridder, were released Wednesday night. Palestinian security officials said the men had been kidnapped by renegade members of the ruling Fatah party. Fatah officials and Palestinian security officers negotiated their release, security officials said. Israel's new arrest raids across the West Bank came as part of a recent crackdown on militants following Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip last month. Undercover forces, some disguised as vegetable vendors, arrested Ibrahim Ighnimat, a Hamas militant linked to a 1997 suicide bombing that killed three Israelis, four shooting attacks and the kidnapping and killing of an Israeli soldier, the army said. Israel has been hunting for Ighnimat, 47, for eight years and has doggedly collected information about him, said Lt.-Col. David Kimchi, commander of the operation. Troops followed Ighnimat for several days and learned his daily routine before the arrest in the village of Tsurif, Kimchi said. The "vegetable vendors" were used to get forces into the town, considered one of the more hostile in the Hebron region, Kimchi said. Ighnimat was sitting in the yard of his house when the soldiers arrived and tried to flee, but was arrested almost immediately, Kimchi said. In another raid, the army arrested a 14-year-old Palestinian boy who told his interrogators that militants from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, which has ties to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement, pressured him to carry out a suicide bombing after he quarrelled with his father.

Militant groups have increasingly turned to youths to carry out attacks in recent years hoping the army would be less suspicious of them. Regardless, the boy, identified by militants and his parents as Salah al Jitan would have been one of the youngest Palestinian suicide bombers. Salah's parents, who confirmed their son is 14, said that after they quarrelled with him about a month ago, five armed Al Aqsa militants came to their house to tell them to leave the boy alone. Last week, they came again, this time to take him away for a suicide bombing, said his father, Moussa al Jitan. Salah did not want to go and his father refused to let him them take him, his father said. The boy did not leave the house until Israeli forces arrested him Monday, a move his parents welcomed. "Good he will be in jail. That's better than dying," said Sariel al Jitan, his mother. The teenager said the militants threatened to kill him and tell everyone he was a collaborator with Israel if he didn't carry out the attack, the army said. Jamal Tirawi, an Al Aqsa commander the army accused of recruiting the boy, said the account was "a lie." Tirawi said Salah was 17 and approached the group to volunteer to carry out an attack. Al Aqsa refused because he is the only son in his family, Tirawi said. "The boy is lying, and the Israelis are lying," he said. Meanwhile, in Dahariya, southwest of Hebron, a gunbattle erupted early Wednesday after troops surrounded a house and called on Hamas fugitive Haitham Battat to surrender. Battat was wanted in connection with a suicide bombing in Beersheba in May. During the fighting, bulldozers began demolishing the home, and Battat's mother was brought in to call for him to surrender. Shouting into the loudspeaker, Battat's mother told him she loves him. Five minutes later the fugitive left the house with his hands up.