During a hunt for one of the most elusive West Bank terrorists, Israel employed tactics that, until October 7, had been extremely rare in the West Bank but common in Gaza, according to a report by Wall Street Journal.
Israel had been hunting Abdullah Abu Shalal for at least a year, but his escapes from the IDF gave him a strong following in his native Balata outside of Nablus.
Having first been arrested in 2010 as a teenager, he was in and out of prison until the late 2010s, according to his family.
After prison, he tried to move into "mainstream society" and completed training for the Palestinian Authority's General Intelligence Service in 2022, the report said.
But soon after joining became disillusioned with the PA's security coordination with Israel, which often led to the deaths of Palestinians. He saw the PA as part of the problem.
Terror in the West Bank
Abu Shalal then joined the Al Aqsa Martyrs's Brigade during an escalation in violence between settlers and civilians.
By 2023, he was in command of a unit composed mostly of teenagers.
He led several terror attacks on Israeli civilians, including a shooting attack on a settlement that injured two in April 2023 and another that injured an Israeli soldier.
In the time since then, despite attempts to kill or capture him, Abu Shalal managed to escape Israeli troops five times, according to the report.
He was finally killed in a drone strike in January, a tactic which, before the beginning of the war in Gaza, was a relatively rare choice for the West Bank.
The IDF conducted about 40 drone strikes in the West Bank from October until March, according to the report. Only a handful of airstrikes were conducted in the West Bank in the years following the end of the Second Intifada.
Abu Shalal's killing has left him a venerated martyr with his face plastered all over Balata. His former comrades told the WSJ that his death "created 10 new militants" and that "The killings of civilians and militants have only led to more people taking up arms and a cycle of more people getting killed."