A day after a Hamas scientist Fadi al-Batsh was mysteriously assassinated in Malaysia, Construction and Housing Minister Yoav Gallant warned that Israel will hunt down its enemies wherever they are.
"Anyone who tries to hurt us should know that we will go to the ends of the earth to find him, and then to bring them to a courthouse or to a cemetery," Gallant said, choosing not to address Israel's alleged role in the killing a day earlier.
Malaysian police said Batsh, 35, was shot early Saturday as he was heading to a mosque for dawn prayers in the capital Kuala Lumpur. The police said closed-circuit television footage showed him being targeted by assassins who had waited for him for almost 20 minutes.
Batsh, who was originally from the Gaza Strip, specialized in electrical and electronic engineering and worked at a Malaysian university. He had lived there with his family for the past eight years and was an imam at a local mosque. Hamas has accused the Israeli Mossad of carrying out the attack.
"We, as a nation and as a government, will not tolerate any terrorist incident," Gallant continued. "Any attack on an Israeli citizen, especially an attack on a Jew, with knife, with a rock, with an explosive device, in Gaza, Judea and Samaria or anywhere else, is not just a terrorist attack but an attempt to challenge our very right to live here. We will respond harshly in any such case, and we will not let Jews become fair game. That period ended 70 years ago [when Israel was founded]," Gallant stated.
Gallant made those comments at a dedication of a new headquarters for ZAKA, an Israeli emergency and disaster relief organization. Gallant's office later clarified that he was not referring to al-Batsh's assassination in Malaysia but to the Second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, in the early part of the previous decade, when he witnessed first hand the contribution of ZAKA.
Meanwhile, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman was asked about the incident on Army Radio and dismissed Israel's culpability. "We heard about it in the news. The terrorist organizations blame every assassination on Israel – we're used to that," Lieberman said. "The man was no saint and he didn't deal with improving infrastructure in Gaza – he was involved in improving rocket accuracy. … We constantly see a settling of accounts between various factions in the terrorist organizations and I suppose that is what happened in this case," he said before adding there was no basis to attribute the assassination to Israel. "By the same token, you could claim James Bond did it," he said.
