Mastermind of paraglider attack killed in airstrike
ISRAEL last night claimed to have killed the terrorist leader behind the murderous squad of paragliders who breached Israel’s defences to attack a music festival three weeks ago.
Asem Abu Rakaba, one of Hamas’s most senior commanders and chief of the aerial division, was taken out in a targeted airstrike, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said.
In a double blow to Hamas, they also claimed to have taken out Ratab Abu Sahiban, the commander of the terror group’s naval force in Gaza, in a separate bombardment.
Abu Sahiban had planned and commanded attempts to attack a coastal kibbutz at Zikim, just north of the Gaza Strip, from the sea last week.
The Israeli air force said it had ‘eliminated’ Abu Sahiban, ‘at the end of a joint intelligence effort’ between various arms of the military.
Meanwhile, the IDF released video footage of the strike on Abu Rakaba, and said he played a crucial role in commanding ‘the terrorists who infiltrated Israel on paragliders and was responsible for the drone attacks on IDF posts’.
The chilling image of the Hamas paragliders hovering in the sky above the Tribe of Nova music festival near the Gazan border, firing their assault rifles indiscriminately on the terrified crowds below is one of the most haunting of the entire murderous operation of October 7.
Following a decoy barrage of 3,000 rockets fired from Gaza, the terrorists flew over the fence marking the border with Israel, then secured the terrain so that a Hamas commando unit could storm the fortified electronic and cement wall.
Next came the waves of killers and kidnappers on motorbikes and in 4x4s. They massacred 260 civilians, injured many more and took an unknown number of hostages.
Surprisingly, much of the aerial preparation devised by Abu Rakaba and his fliers was carried out in plain sight.
Several videos were even filmed by Hamas, and used in its propaganda effort, showing the men training enthusiastically for an operation to occupy dummy IDF bases and Israeli towns built in Gaza.
But the IDF, and the country’s intelligence agencies somehow failed to appreciate the danger under their noses.
Former Lebanese general Khalil Helou, told Beirut news service L’Orient Today that the use of motorised paragliders by Hamas was well known to Israel.
He said: ‘I read several leaked intelligence reports from the Israeli authorities, that the intelligence saw the training carried out by Hamas militants in paragliders.’
Mr Helou added: ‘But they did not really believe that Hamas had the capabilities to carry out such an operation or that the paragliding method would indeed work.’