No Responsibility

IDF officer: Israel recently removed road block from site of fatal attack

Last week, Israel removed a West Bank road block on the very road where 40-year-old Meir Hai was killed in a shooting attack Thursday afternoon, so said an Israel Defense Forces officer who preferred to remain nameless.

The roadblock, known as the barrels road block, the officer said, monitored the traffic around Nablus in the direction of Tul Karm. The perpetrators of Thursday's attack, apparently fled through the point where this roadblock used to be, the officer explained.

I wrote about responsibility before (here in June) and (here).

We warned the IDF that terror would return if facilitated and that the US pressure to lessen our security for the sake of Arabs is wrong.

Oh, and as AP reported in the NYTimes:

An Israeli man was shot to death in the West Bank on Thursday. A little-known militant group identifying itself as a faction of the Fatah movement of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, claimed responsibility for the attack, in an e-mail message to journalists. Israel Radio identified the victim as a 45-year-old resident of a nearby Israeli settlement. Christmas celebrations proceeded without incident in Bethlehem.

The full report it seems:

Gunmen kill Israeli in West Bank shooting attack
By TIA GOLDENBERG
The Associated Press
Thursday, December 24, 2009; 5:15 PM

JERUSALEM -- Gunmen killed an Israeli man in a shooting attack in the West Bank on Thursday as local attention was focused on Christmas celebrations in nearby Bethlehem.

A Palestinian group took responsibility for the killing.

The man, a resident of a Jewish settlement nearby, was in his 40s and was a father of seven, said Col. Avi Gil, the Israeli military commander in the area. Gil said the military had lifted restrictions on Palestinian movement in the area and that the perpetrators of the attack took advantage of that.

Shooting attacks were once commonplace on routes around the West Bank but have now become rare. Thursday's incident was one of only a handful to take place this year.

The Israeli military has kept many West Bank roads off-limits to Palestinian drivers in restrictions imposed after similar attacks against Israelis, but those restrictions have been gradually loosened and some checkpoints removed as violence in the West Bank has subsided.

A little-known Palestinian militant group identifying itself as a faction of President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement claimed responsibility for the attack in an e-mail sent to journalists.

The quiet in the West Bank in recent years has been due both to action by Israel's military against armed Palestinian groups and to the increasing control of security forces loyal to Abbas' Western-backed government.

The relative quiet allowed holiday celebrations to go ahead without incident Thursday in Bethlehem, where thousands of locals and visitors thronged the square outside Jesus' traditional birthplace.