Israeli Troops Kill the Man Blamed for Gidon Perry's Murder

A Palestinian man held responsible for a fatal attack in 2024 was killed during an overnight arrest raid south of Jenin, in the northern West Bank, the Israel Defense Forces said on Tuesday 25 November 2025.

According to the military, Sultan al-Ghani was responsible for the murder of Gidon Perry, aged 38, at the Bar-On Industrial Park in August 2024. Al-Ghani worked at a factory that Perry managed. He attacked Perry with a hammer, took his gun and his vehicle and fled. In an operation lasting through the night, soldiers arrested five accomplices and then surrounded the building where al-Ghani had holed up; he was killed in the exchange of fire that followed. Troops afterwards recovered a "Carlo" type weapon, an M16, a charge and cartridges with ammunition.

What a "Carlo" is

The Carlo is not a factory weapon. It is a crude submachine gun loosely copied from a Swedish design and built in small West Bank workshops from materials any metalworker can obtain. The Times of Israel reported in 2016 that making one requires little more than a drill press, welding equipment and blueprints from the internet, and that many are smoothbore, sparing the maker the trouble of cutting rifling. One documented example used commercially available water pipe as its barrel.

Price is the point. At the time of that reporting a basic Carlo cost roughly 3,000 to 10,000 shekels and a better-made rifled version 10,000 to 15,000, against 60,000 to 80,000 shekels for a genuine M16 in the West Bank. "If you steal one car, you can buy two guns, not one," a senior Israeli officer told the paper. Because the tooling is so ordinary, workshops are easily replaced after raids, which is why the recovery of both a Carlo and an M16 in one building is the sort of detail the military tends to publicise.

A year of Israeli operations in the northern West Bank

Jenin has been the centre of the largest Israeli operation in the West Bank in two decades. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded that Operation Iron Wall began there on 21 January 2025 and spread to Tulkarm and Tubas, involving helicopter fire, air strikes and tanks, and that 126 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces across the West Bank between 21 January and 30 June 2025, 74 of them in the Jenin, Tubas and Tulkarm governorates and 41 in Jenin alone. Human Rights Watch, in a report published five days before this raid, counted roughly 32,000 people displaced from the three refugee camps and more than 850 buildings destroyed or badly damaged.

The broader toll has climbed with it. The Times of Israel, reporting on the same operation, noted that more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces or settlers since the war began, according to the Palestinian Authority health ministry.

What is still unclear

The military did not say what led it to the building where al-Ghani was found, or how he had avoided arrest in the intervening period. It did not identify the five accomplices, say what they are suspected of, or say whether they have been charged. Nor did the statement say whether any Israeli soldier was hurt in the shootout, and it gave no Palestinian account of the raid.