JERUSALEM: The Israeli military said a strike on Gaza on Thursday killed a Palestinian who had waved his blood-stained hands at a crowd after a deadly attack on Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank more than two decades ago.
The civil defense agency in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip confirmed Abdelaziz Salha’s death, saying he was killed when an Israeli strike hit a tent in a displacement camp in central Gaza’s Deir Al-Balah early on Thursday.
Salha in 2004 was sentenced to life for his part in the killing of Israeli soldier Vadim Norzich in the West Bank city of Ramallah four years earlier, in an incident caught on camera by an Italian television crew and broadcast across the globe.
A second soldier, Yossi Avrahami, was also killed in the October 2000 attack.
The widely shared footage — one of the most well-known images from the start of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising — showed Salha standing in an upstairs window of the Ramallah police station, waving his blood-stained hands at a crowd.
Announcing his death in an air strike, the military said that since his release from prison in 2011 and “over the past few years, Salha was involved in terrorist activity” in the West Bank.
The army statement said he was “involved in Hamas terrorist activity to this day.”
Salha was sent to Gaza by Israeli authorities after being released from jail, one of 1,027 Palestinians freed in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit who was taken hostage by Gaza militants in 2006.