Alwaght- A Palestinian academic and engineer from Gaza assassinated by Israeli Regime's spy agency Mossad in Malaysia on Saturday morning, the victim's family says.
Dr Fadi Mohammed al-Batash, 35, who was married and had three children, was shot by two people on a motorcycle at the entrance to a mosque in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital. The assailants fired ten shots and killed him as he was leaving a mosque after morning prayers in town of Gombak, Kuala Lumpur police chief Mazlan Lazim said in statement.
Batash's family, as well as an Islamic Jihad senior leader, Khaled al-Batash, accused Mossad of being behind the assassination, and called on Malaysian authorities to conduct a “comprehensive and rapid investigation” before his killers escaped.
“We, as a family, accuse the Mossad of being behind the assassination of Dr. Fadi Mohammad al-Batsh, a researcher in energy sciences,” al-Batash said to Al-Miyadin news network.
Palestinian resistance movement Hamas issued a statement, saying that Batash “was working for the Palestinian cause.”
"The Islamic Resistance Movement mourns the son of its sons, the righteous, and a knight of its knights, a scholar of young Palestine scholars and the guardian of the Book of Allah, the son of Jabalia the Mujahideen," read the statement.
"The martyr was distinguished by his excellence and scientific creativity and has important contributions in this area and participated in international conferences in the field of energy. The martyr was an example in calling God and working for the Palestinian cause."
Malaysian authorities also said it was treating the murder as an act of terrorism and that it had begun an immediate investigation.
Police said that Batash, also known as Fadi Albatsh, was shot in the "body and head" and that CCTV footage showed him being targeted by assassins who had waited for him for almost 20 minutes.
Batash's father told Al Jazeera it was suspected that Mossad was behind Batash's murder.
The family said Batash, who had lived in Malaysia for ten years, had intended to fly to Turkey for a science conference on energy. Israeli news outlet Haaretz said he was due to fly to Turkey this weekend.
Before travelling to Malaysia to take up a post as a lecturer at a private university, he was employed by the Energy Authority in the Gaza Strip. Israel's YNet news reported that he was a lecturer at the British-Malaysian Institute at the University of Kuala Lumpur.
Palestine's ambassador to Malaysia, Anwar H Al-Agha, told the New Strait Times that Batash was the second imam at the mosque near where he was killed. Jalan Gombak, where he is reported to have been killed, is immediate to the northeast of Kuala Lumpur.
Batash was active on Twitter and voiced support for Palestinians in Gaza taking part in the Great March for Return, the series of protests held near the Gaza-Israeli border since the end of March demanding the right of Palestinian refugees and their dependents to return to Israel.
As of 20 April, at least 43 Palestinians had been reported killed and more than 4,000 injured in the protests, which are scheduled to continue until 15 May. No Israeli casualties have been reported.
Batash recently retweeted several eulogies commemorating journalist and photographer Yaser Murtaja, a 30-year-old Palestinian who left behind a wife and one child when Israeli security forces shot him dead when he was covering the Great March for Return protest on 6 April.
In December 2017 Hamas’s chief drone expert and engineer Mohamed Zouari, was shot dead in Tunisia in an assassination also blamed on the Mossad. According to Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, Mohammed Zawari, who had been a member of the group for 10 years and supervising its drone program was gunned down in his car near his home close to the city of Sfax.
Ronen Bergman, the intelligence correspondent for Israeli Yediot Aharonot newspaper, in a book titled Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, revealed that Israeli regime has carried out at least 2,700 assassination operations against Palestinians, Egyptians, Syrians and Iranians since World War II.
Relying on around 1,000 interviews and thousands of documents, Bergman chronicled many techniques and asserts that Israeli regime's assassination machine has adopted, including poisoned toothpaste that takes a month to end its target’s life; armed drones; exploding cell phones; spare tires with remote-control bombs; as well as assassinating enemy scientists.
The regime has killed many Palestinian leaders, including those with the Gaza Strip-based resistance movement of Hamas.
The over 600-page book suggested that Israel used radiation poisoning to kill Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader who was the founder of the Fatah movement, investigations into whose murder continue up to date.
The book’s title comes from the ancient Jewish Talmud admonition, “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” Bergman says a huge percentage of the people he interviewed cited that passage as justification for their work. So does an opinion by the military’s lawyer declaring such operations to be legitimate acts of war.
Bergman called the Israeli assassination apparatus “the most robust streamlined assassination machine in history.” He says many of the Israeli techniques were later adopted by the US.
