JERUSALEM - A Palestinian man lured an Israeli soldier to the West Bank on Friday, then killed him in hopes of using the body as leverage to lobby for the release of his brother from an Israeli prison, military officials said Saturday.
Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said the Palestinian, Nidal Amar, 42, had confessed to the crime after being arrested early Saturday along with another brother and six others. Lerner said that Amar knew the 20-year-old soldier, Sgt. Tomer Hazan, because they had worked together in a restaurant in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bat Yam. Amar had picked the soldier up in a taxi Friday in Israel and had taken him first to a Jewish settlement in the West Bank and then persuaded him to go to the nearby Palestinian village of Beit Amin, where Amar lived.
Amar then took Hazan to an open area nearby, killed him and hid his body in a water cistern. “He wanted to barter with the dead body,” Lerner said.
It was unclear Saturday how Amar persuaded the soldier to go with him, or what kind of relationship they had. Lerner said Amar was married to an Israeli citizen but had no permit to be in Israel. Since the second intifada a decade ago and Israel’s subsequent building of a barrier separating it from most of the West Bank, Israeli travel into Palestinian villages is relatively uncommon. The kidnapping of soldiers in Israel, where military service is mandatory for most Jews, is seen by some Palestinian militants as a powerful tactic.
Lerner said that Amar’s imprisoned brother, Nur ad-Din Amar, had been incarcerated since 2003 and was a member of the Tanzim militia, an offshoot of the Palestinian Fatah faction founded in 1995. He did not detail the crimes of which Nur ad-Din Amar was accused, nor say whether there had been any recent development in his case that might have spurred his brother to act.
Hazan had a noncombat position in the air force and had an arrangement allowing him to hold a job outside the military - at the restaurant, a senior military official said. He was killed with a “cold weapon” - not a firearm - but the official would not disclose the exact weapon used. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was notauthorized to talk to the media.
The soldier’s family informed Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, that he was missing about 10 p.m. Friday, according to a military news release. Lerner said an investigation immediately followed involving a large number of intelligence officers and military officials, who Saturday morning stormed Beit Amin, a village of about 1,100 people not far over the Green Line separating Israel from the West Bank. Within hours, Amar led the authorities to the body and confessed, the colonel said.
A senior military official said initial investigations suggested that Palestinian individuals planned the attack ontheir own, not on the orders of any militant groups.
Such cases are rare, but it is not the first instance of Palestinians abducting Israeli soldiers, sometimes killing them afterward. The military has a longstanding campaign warning soldiers not to accept rides from strangers.
In 2001, a Palestinian woman lured an Israeli teenage boy over the Internet to the West Bank where he wasmurdered by waiting Palestinian militants. The woman, Amna Muna, was released in 2011 along with more than a thousand other Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Schalit, held captive in Gaza by Hamas-allied militants.
Information for this article was contributed by Jodi Rudoren of The New York Times and Ian Deitch of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 12 on 09/22/2013