‘He almost never made mistakes’: How the IDF found and killed Barkan terrorist

“He almost never made mistakes.” That was how a senior IDF officer described Ashraf Suleiman Na’alwa, the terrorist behind the attack on the Barkan Industrial Park two months ago, just hours after he was found and killed by Israeli security forces. 

According to the Shin Bet, Na’alwa had been armed when forces arrived to the scene and was planning to carry a second terror attack, “which was prevented with the thwarting of the assailant.”

A senior IDF officer told reporters on a call Thursday morning that “there is no doubt that he didn’t relax during the past two months. He was planning to fight, to carry out another attack and we knew that we need to get him before that could happen.”

Na’alwa, from the West Bank village of Shuweika near Tulkarem, was on the run from security forces over two months after he shot and killed Kim Yehezkel-Levengrond and Ziv Hajbi, in a shooting attack in the Barkan industrial area outside Ariel in the West Bank on October 7th.

The senior IDF officer said that security forces had been close to capturing Na’alwa on several occasions before, but that he succeeded in escaping at the last minute. In addition, the officer said that Na’alwa did not use mobile phones or any other communications technology, making it more difficult for Israeli security forces to locate him.

“He almost didn’t make any mistakes and was able to live on the run for a good period of time. He had a lot of luck and help after the attack,” the senior officer said. 

Referring to the neutralization of a member of the cell which carried out Sunday’s Ofra shooting attack, the senior officer said that the “dynamics of such a military operation is that sometimes it doesn’t take a lot of time and sometimes it takes time but it’s not like years ago when wanted suspects live regularly. These guys didn’t, they were on the run.”

But while Na’alwa repeatedly eluded capture by security forces for two months, Israel was on the hunt, conducting dozens of arrest raids and bringing in and indicting several relatives and alleged accomplices.

According to the senior officer, dozens of operations were carried out across the northern West Bank in order to find him but that it took time and was difficult since he “operated on his own” and succeeded in staying off the grid.

Local Palestinian reports said that Na’alwa was located around 1.30AM in an apartment in the Askar refugee camp outside of Nablus by security forces and had been armed with his Carl-Kustav submachine gun which he had used to kill Yehezkel-Levengrond and Hajbi.  He was killed after an exchange of fire broke out between him and Israeli troops.

Na’alwa was killed just hours after a Palestinian suspected of carrying out the shooting attack outside the West Bank settlement of Ofra on Sunday was killed by security forces north of Ramallah in the village of Surda.

He was identified by local media as Saleh Omar Barghouti, the son of senior Hamas member Omar Barghouti from the town of Kobar.

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