A Gazan terror group operative who carried out a string of terrorist offenses
against Israel will go to prison for 35 years, the Beersheba District Court
ruled on Monday.
According to the indictment, 30-year-old Mohammed Mehera
from Jabalya in Gaza joined the al-Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades, the military
wing of the Palestinian Popular Resistance Committees, in 2003.
Mehera
planted explosives against IDF forces, fired rockets into Israel and transferred
information about IDF forces, which his operators used to carry out a 2004
terror attack that killed IDF soldier St. Sgt. Gilad Fisher and wounded three
others.
Fisher, 22, was killed on September 30, 2004, when Hamas
terrorists attacked an IDF lookout post east of Beit Hanun in Gaza.
The
indictment said Mehera agreed to participate in the attack after meeting a Hamas
activist, known as Massoud, in 2004. Massoud took Mehera to the house of another
Hamas man, Ayman, where Mehera agreed to undertake a surveillance mission on an
IDF outpost and scope out possible locations for suicide bombers.
In
mid-September 2004, Mehera passed the information he gathered back to Ayman and
Massoud, who used it to plan a terror attack.
Two weeks later, two Hamas
suicide bombers attacked the IDF lookout post, killing Fisher and wounding three
other soldiers, one of whom suffered permanent lower-body paralysis as a result
of the attack.
Mehera also fired rockets into Israel in 2005 from
al-Atatra in northern Gaza. He and other operatives from al-Nasser Salah al-Din
Brigades placed the rockets in a vineyard and aimed them at Israel before using
a timing mechanism to launch them.
The offenses for which Mehera is
convicted include membership and activity in a terror group, conspiracy to
commit murder, attempted murder, contact with a foreign agent and providing
information to the enemy.