Palestinian Militants Execute Suspected Informer for Israel

To the cheers of onlookers, Palestinian militants dragged a man accused of collaborating with Israel to a village square in the northern West Bank on Friday and gunned him down.

Rafiq Daraghmeh, 45, begged for his life, witnesses said, before being riddled with automatic-weapons fire by members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia loosely affiliated with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction.

“It was obvious he was very, very frightened, and he pleaded with them to spare him,” said Mahmoud Ali, a resident of the West Bank village of Kabatiya, where the execution-style killing took place. “But they read out the charges against him, and almost immediately afterward he was shot and killed. Some people then applauded.”

The gunmen also accused Daraghmeh of sexually abusing his two daughters. None of the accusations against him could be verified.

Ali, the witness, said that after the charges against Daraghmeh were read out, the crowd of several hundred people chanted, “Execute him! Execute him!”

Palestinians said the man, a resident of the nearby village of Tubas, was abducted from a hospital in the West Bank city of Jenin before the killing and for an undetermined amount of time was in the custody of militants who interrogated him.

In Tubas, relatives shunned the slain man even in death, refusing to claim his body from the authorities.

Informants are scattered throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Even those Palestinians who are only vaguely suspected of aiding the Israelis are dealt with harshly. Several dozen have been killed by other Palestinians during the nearly 4-year-old conflict.

Palestinian sources said Daraghmeh was accused of leading Israeli forces to safe houses where Palestinian militants were holed up. Israel conducts nearly daily search-and-arrest raids in West Bank towns and cities, hunting for fugitives believed to have taken part in attacks against Israelis.

Without the network of informants -- some of them lured with the prospect of financial gain, some virtually blackmailed over alleged sexual misconduct or other acts -- Israeli forces would face great difficulty searching for wanted men. Security sources say many suicide attacks are foiled, sometimes at the last minute, because of information provided by Palestinian informants.

In the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces pressed ahead with an operation aimed at halting weapons smuggling along the seaside territory’s border with Egypt and with an operation to secure a sector of the northern Gaza Strip frequently used to stage rocket attacks against Jewish settlements and Israeli towns.

Three Palestinians were reported killed Friday in Gaza, where violence has increased sharply since Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced plans to withdraw soldiers and uproot Jewish settlers by the end of next year. Palestinian officials said a man killed by Israeli troops in Rafah, at Gaza’s southern tip, was a scrap-metal dealer who was trying to salvage material.

They also said a Palestinian man killed near a Jewish settlement in the south of Gaza was a farmer.

The third was said to be a civilian who was killed in the northeastern Gaza community of Beit Hanoun, where the Israeli army moved in this week to try to stop militants from firing crude homemade rockets.

The army said it had not verified the identities of the slain men.