Ayyash's Widow Held for Incitement 30 Years After His Killing

Israel Police arrested the widow of Yahya Ayyash, the Hamas bomb-maker killed by Israeli security forces three decades ago, after what the force described as posts on social media amounting to incitement, praise and glorification of terrorist organisations. The arrest came around the time of the thirtieth anniversary of his death.

Among the material police cited was a propaganda video honouring her late husband. According to the police account, it showed suicide bombings on buses and closed with a call to continue attacks. The statement did not name her, did not say where the arrest took place, and did not specify which offence she is suspected of.

Who Yahya Ayyash was

Ayyash, an electrical engineering graduate of Birzeit University, became Hamas’s chief bomb-maker and was known as “the Engineer”. He led the West Bank battalion of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, from late 1993 until his death, and built the devices used in a series of attacks in the mid-1990s including bombings in Afula, Hadera and on Jerusalem and Tel Aviv buses. Reference accounts put the death toll from bombings he prepared at around 90 Israelis, many of them civilians. The campaign ran through the years immediately after the Oslo Accords, as the Palestinian Authority was taking up limited self-rule in Gaza and parts of the West Bank, the period the original police account refers to.

The phone that killed him

Ayyash was killed on 5 January 1996. Israeli agents had placed explosive in a mobile phone; it detonated when he took a call, and the charge was small enough that he alone was hurt. Accounts of the operation place him in Gaza, taking his weekly call to his father, with the Shin Bet internal security service responsible. Israel neither confirmed nor denied its role at the time; a former Shin Bet director, Carmi Gillon, acknowledged the operation publicly in 2012. Four suicide bombings in February and March 1996 killed 78 Israelis, and Ayyash has remained a fixture of Palestinian commemorative culture ever since, with streets in Jenin and Ramallah and a square in Jericho named after him.

What Israeli law does with online praise

Israel criminalises the kind of publication described in the police statement. Under the Counter-Terrorism Law of 2016, which consolidated a patchwork of earlier emergency measures, incitement to terrorism carries up to five years’ imprisonment and the separate offence of identifying with a terrorist organisation carries up to three, according to the legal database maintained by the Palestinian-Israeli rights group Adalah, which is itself a critic of the statute and argues its definitions are too broad.

What is still unclear

The police statement gave no date for the arrest, no location, and no indication of whether the woman has been charged or brought before a court. It did not say which platform the posts appeared on, how many there were, or who produced the video she is said to have shared. Nor did it identify the specific offence under investigation.