JERUSALEM (AFP) – Israel has arrested a Palestinian who it claims infiltrated the country from Gaza with the aim of setting up armed cells in the occupied West Bank, the government said on Sunday.
Abdelrahman Talalkeh was indicted by a court in Beersheva in southern Israel after being netted in a joint operation between police and security services on June 1, a spokesman said in a statement.
The 25-year-old resident of the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza was scooped up in the Negev desert after having entered Israel via Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.
Israel claims the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), a Palestinian militant group in the Gaza Strip, dispatched Talalkeh "to establish a terrorism infrastructure inside Israel".
"He admitted to having undergone extensive military training in the Gaza Strip," the government said.
Israel says Talalkeh trained in the use of small arms and in preparing chemicals, car-bombs and explosive belts, hoping to transfer his knowledge to fellow Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Talalkeh also planned to train militants in the use of GPS devices, map-reading, and intelligence gathering for operations including "suicide attacks and the abduction and murder of soldiers," the government said.
The PRC was one of three groups, including the much larger Islamist Hamas movement ruling Gaza, that jointly claimed responsibility for the capture of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2006 in a deadly cross-border raid.
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