RAMALLAH/GAZA (Reuters) – A senior Palestinian militant jailed for life by Israel, and who was cited by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in a speech to the United Nations, died of cancer on Tuesday, authorities said.
Nasser Abu Hamid, co-founder of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of Abbas’s Fatah movement, had been convicted of killing seven Israelis and planning other attacks. The Brigades is deemed a terrorist group in Israel and the West.
He was serving multiple life sentences and had been in prison since 2002.
Abbas accused Israel of neglecting Abu Hamid’s medical needs and held it responsible for his death, the official news agency WAFA said. Israel’s Prisons Service said Abu Hamid, 50, had received “close and continuous treatment” for his lung cancer.
After Abu Hamid fell into a coma, the Prisons Service let his family visit him briefly on Monday, in the presence of guards, his mother told Voice of Palestine radio.
“Thank God, I and his brothers were able to see him and pay him farewell,” she said, adding that she hoped his body would be released for burial.
In his speech to the U.N. General Assembly in September, Abbas said Palestinians were telling “the heroic prisoner Nasser Abu Hamid and his companions that dawn is coming, and it is time for their chains to be broken”.
(Reporting by Nidal Almughrabi in Gaza and Ali Sawafta in Ramallah; Editing by Robert Birsel)
