JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that three Israeli teenagers who went missing in the West Bank on Thursday night were kidnapped by “members of Hamas,” the Islamist militant movement that controls the Gaza Strip and is a partner in the new Palestinian unity government.
Netanyahu’s claim of Hamas involvement came after Israeli security forces detained 80 Palestinians early Sunday in a sweep that stretched across the West Bank.
Among those arrested were top Hamas political leaders, former government ministers and members of Hamas’s militant wing. University lecturers, clerics and members of the group Islamic Jihad also were detained.
Israel vowed that it would not only punish the kidnappers and Hamas, but also hold the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its president, Mahmoud Abbas, responsible for the abductions.
“We will respond with an iron fist to terror,” said Naftali Bennett, Israel’s economics minister and the third most powerful member of Netanyahu’s coalition government.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he will hold the Palestinian government accountable for the kidnappings. (Jack Guez/AFP/Getty)
The three teenagers, ages 16 to 19, attended religious schools in the West Bank and were abducted Thursday evening as they hitchhiked home. One of the youths managed to make a cellphone call to a police emergency line and say, “We’ve been kidnapped.”
Relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority were already at a low point, after the collapse of U.S.-brokered peace talks in April and the creation this month of the unity government backed by Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah movement. Israel and most of the West consider Hamas a terrorist organization.