During a large-scale arrest operation carried out this week, on the night between Tuesday and Wednesday, in the town of Silwad north of Ramallah, Israeli security forces turned a residential building into a temporary detention and field interrogation facility. Dozens of local residents were brought to the site and intensively questioned by Shin Bet and military interrogators, in an effort to disrupt terrorist networks and increase pressure on Hamas operatives in the area. But what made the operation particularly unusual, and has now sparked controversy in Palestinian media, was the psychological strategy revealed inside the abandoned room: a photograph of notorious terrorist Ibrahim Hamed sitting in his prison cell, with his hands and feet shackled, had been hung on the walls as part of a psychological operation targeting the detainees. Hamed was responsible, among other attacks, for deadly bombings in Jerusalem, including those at the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall, Caf\u00e9 Moment and Hebrew University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After the forces withdrew and the home’s residents returned, they discovered to their astonishment that the room’s walls had been covered with preprinted posters showing recent photographs of Ibrahim Hamed, a native of the town, shackled by his hands and feet inside his solitary confinement cell in an Israeli prison. Displaying the humiliated image of the former commander of Hamas’s Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades in the West Bank directly before the eyes of young detainees served as a deliberate instrument of psychological warfare and perception management, an initiative led by Israel’s security establishment. The message conveyed to the suspects was unmistakable: even the most admired and senior commanders are not immune, Israel can reach them anywhere, and their ultimate fate may be isolation and humiliation behind bars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hamed, captured in 2006 after a prolonged manhunt, is regarded by Israeli security authorities as one of the most dangerous and lethal terrorist planners, and a key figure in Hamas leadership who has often been compared to the Yahya Sinwar of the West Bank. Hamed is considered the mastermind behind a series of brutal suicide bombings that shook Israel during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A substantial portion of the bloodshed planned by Hamed was directed at the very heart of Jerusalem. He was responsible for the double suicide bombing on Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem on December 1, 2001, when two suicide bombers detonated their explosives, killing 11 Israelis. Hamed was also the architect of the deadly 2002 bombing at Caf\u00e9 Moment in the city, in which 11 people were murdered, and the attack at Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus that same year, which claimed the lives of nine students and staff members. Because of his direct responsibility for the murders of dozens of Israelis in the capital and other cities, Hamed was convicted in 2012 and sentenced to an unprecedented 54 life terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While Hamas continues to demand his release in negotiations over prisoner and hostage exchanges, the nighttime operation in Silwad demonstrated that, for Israeli security forces, Hamed himself has become a psychological weapon intended to break the spirit of those seeking to follow in his footsteps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
During a large-scale arrest operation carried out this week, on the night between Tuesday and Wednesday, in the town of Silwad north of Ramallah, Israeli security forces turned a residential building into a temporary detention and field interrogation facility. Dozens of local residents were brought to the site and intensively questioned by Shin Bet and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":186069,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"9320","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_seopress_news_disabled":"","_seopress_video_disabled":"","_seopress_video":[],"_seopress_pro_schemas_manual":[],"_seopress_pro_rich_snippets_disable_all":"","_seopress_pro_rich_snippets_disable":[],"_seopress_pro_schemas":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[10712,10628,10704],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-10712","category-10628","category-10704"],"acf":{"subtitle":"A photograph of Ibrahim Hamed, responsible for attacks at Jerusalem's Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall, Caf\u00e9 Moment and Hebrew University, was used by Israeli security forces during an arrest operation near Ramallah"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerusalem-online.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerusalem-online.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerusalem-online.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerusalem-online.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerusalem-online.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186068"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jerusalem-online.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":186071,"href":"https:\/\/jerusalem-online.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186068\/revisions\/186071"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerusalem-online.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerusalem-online.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerusalem-online.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerusalem-online.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}