03-Aug-17: Two Shalit Deal beneficiaries are at the heart of a just-busted Hamas terror-financing operation

Shalit Deal terrorists being sent to their ill-gotten freedom, October 2011

How much damage did Israel do to itself by engaging with the terrorist thugs of Hamas in the 2011 Gilad Shalit transaction?

Whatever the answer, the toll is not static. It continues to grow and it includes innocent people murdered by terrorists who had murdered before they were released in the Shalit Deal and then murdered again once they were freed.

As we have said and written on numerous occasions since the catastrophic transaction was put together, we will regret the Shalit Deal for generations.

Here's today's update.

Israel announced that its Shin Bet security service  discovered and unraveled what Times of Israel describes as

a complex Hamas money laundering operation that brought nearly three quarters of a million shekels into the terrorist group’s coffers... Through this plot, which began in early 2016, the group managed to transfer approximately $200,000 (NIS 720,000) into its Hebron offices from Turkey, with help from Gaza, in order to fund terrorist activities... In light of Israeli sanctions on the group, Hamas cannot freely move money in and out of the country. 

Five members of Hamas, all of them residing in Judea and Samaria in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, have been arrested. Two other suspects living in Turkey and the Gaza Strip are wanted but still, as far as we know, free.

The names we know include two men whose ability to engage in the funding of jihadist terror was handed to them as a gift when they were freed by Israel in that notorious 2011 deal with Hamas.

• The head of the operation is said to be Muhammad Maher Bader. Described as "a senior member of Hamas in Hebron", he is also "a member of the Palestinian parliament" which has not sat for many years. He has been in Israeli custody since June.
• Muasseb Hashalmon, also of Hebron, is under arrest and described as a money courier who brought cash to Hamas from Turkey.
• The same for Taha Uthman, also of Hebron.
• Another resident of Hebron named as Umar Qimri worked with a Hamas agent based in Gaza to conjure up the deals that were meant to disguise the cash transfers. 
• Yet another resident of Hebron, Yusri Hashalmon, did the same.

The Hamas agent in Gaza is named by Times of Israel as Majd Jaaba who is also originally from Hebron. He has been a Gazan resident since being released to there in the Shalit Deal.

Times of Israel says the Hamas agent at the Turkish end of this scheme is Haron Nasser al-Din, who is also originally from Hebron and like Jaaba got out of prison in the Shalit Deal.

Few in the news media, even in Israel, have closely followed or reported on what the murdering terrorists let loose in the Shalit Deal have done since October 2011. That's why there are unlikely to be reports on who these Shalit winners are and what got them into prison in the first place.

The man called Majd Jaaba is, we believe, prisoner number 996825550. In the Shalit papers, his name is given as Majid Muhammad Yunes al-Jaaba. Born in Hebron in 1970, he had been arrested on April 16, 1995 and charged with multiple offences including intentional homicide. He was found guilty and sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment. As it turned out, he served nothing like that sentence and was released after a mere sixteen years. Now he's back to doing more terror directed at innocent Israelis. To clarify, he was not arrested - he's living free under the Gazan Hamas regime.

The Hamas terrorist holding down the Turkish end of the complex trail is identified in the Shalit papers as Harun Mansur Ya'aqub Nasser al-Din, prisoner number 904273463. He too was born in 1970 and lived in Hebron. On December 15, 1992, he was convicted in an Israeli court of murder, possession of explosives and other related offences and sentenced to life imprisonment. He walked free after less than 19 years, and like his colleague al-Jaaba, is back to his passion for terrorism directed at Israelis. Like al-Jaaba, he is free as a bird, living in Turkey.

Why don't reports of the post-prison exploits of Shalit Deal terrorists tell you what those jihadists did to be in prison in the first place?

By our calculations, based on publicly available documents and our own analysis, of the 1,027 Palestinian Arabs terrorists let loose in the Shalit Deal, 520 - meaning more than half - were in prison for murder, other forms of homicide or attempted homicide.

(The mastermind of the massacre in which our fifteen year old daughter was murdered walked free in the Shalit Deal. Though she has been on the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists list since March 2017, she is free as a bird under the protection of the Jordanian government which refuses to extradite her. Jordan signed an extradition treaty with the US in 1995.)