News broke on Tuesday that Ibrahim, an Israeli citizen born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Gaza, had been shot and killed by a gunman as he returned to his home in Jabel Mukaber, a neighborhood of Jerusalem.
The incident marks yet another act of Palestinian violence and as Palestinian terrorist groups have constantly attacked Israelis in recent months, it also represents an escalation in the operation against the group in the occupied West Bank. Israel’s Security Cabinet is said to have met immediately after the news broke.
In a statement issued, the Hamas terrorist group said they executed the operation in response to the “massacre against the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.” Speaking on Israeli television, a Hamas spokesman, Fawzi Barhoum, insisted that Ibrahim had been a “heroic operation.” Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has declared his support for Hamas and has targeted and eliminated many of its members in an effort to disarm the group, has not yet commented on the incident.
In video footage of the shooting, the gunman could be seen on a bike as he approached Ibrahim and opened fire at point-blank range. Israeli police told the Jerusalem Post that Ibrahim was returning home to tend to his elderly mother as well as other family members who live in the neighborhood. He was wearing a coat, which caught his head on fire and killed him.
“My brother came to us from Gaza as a child after his family was uprooted,” Ibrahim’s brother said of the young man. “He left Gaza after what happened with his family and came here to escape to another land.”
Hamas has condemned the actions of the gunmen and the statement said that Israel has “lost” a “martyr.” It is unclear if they will publicly back Ibrahim’s family.