A founding member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade terror group, convicted of murdering seven Israelis and five Palestinian collaborators, died Tuesday morning of cancer while in Israeli custody, officials said Palestinians.
Nasser Abu Hmeid, 51, was diagnosed with lung cancer last August, and his condition has since deteriorated, with cancer cells spreading throughout his body, including his brain, according to the Human Affairs Commission. Palestinian prisoners and ex-prisoners.
The Commission, along with other Palestinian groups, accused the Israel Prison Service of negligence and of deliberately killing Abu Hmeid, saying his cancer should have been discovered earlier and treated better.
The prison service rejected the allegation, saying the prisoner “received regular and close care from IPS medical staff and external professionals”.
In recent months, Palestinian groups have also called for the release of Abu Hmeid because of his medical condition and threatened to carry out attacks if he died in Israeli custody. Similar threats have been issued against other crippled security prisoners in the past, but these rarely materialize.
After Abu Hmeid’s death, some Palestinian groups called for a general strike in the West Bank, including the Palestinian Bar Association and the General Union of Palestinian Teachers, who called for a halt to work from 11 a.m. tuesday.
In 2002, Abu Hmeid, the right-hand man of arch-terrorist Marwan Barghouti, was convicted of murdering seven Israelis – Eliyahu Cohen, Binyamin and Talia Kahane, Gad Rejwan, Yosef Habi, Eli Dahan and Salim Barakat – in a number of terrorist attacks. attacks of the second Intifada that he personally perpetrated or directed from afar. During the trial, the Israeli authorities called him a “killing machine”.
He was also convicted of 12 counts of attempted murder and a number of other security-related charges and served multiple life sentences.
He was also convicted of murdering five Palestinians who teamed up with Israel in 1990, but was released a few years later under the Oslo Accords.
As his health worsened, Abu Hmeid was taken to Shamir Medical Center on Monday, where he received medication to control his pain.
His mother was in the process of getting permission to visit him in hospital when he died, according to official Palestinian media Wafa. His family had already been allowed to visit him in hospital in January after he underwent surgery to remove a tumor in his lung.
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