On 3rd March 2002, 22-year-old Palestinian, Thaer Hamad from the Ramallah-area village of Silwad, armed with an old WW2, M1 carbine shot 24 Israeli occupation soldiers and their reinforcements at a checkpoint sited in an old British police post on the road between Nablus and Ramallah - before his gun blew up - killing 11 of them in the process in the space of 24 minutes. Hamad hid behind mountain shrubs and olive trees and picked off the soldiers one by one - but spared the lives of an Israeli "settler" woman and her two children who chanced upon the killing zone shouting at them to speed away from his killing field. His sharpshooting skills were so supernal and deadly that the unnerved, lying Israelis bruited it abroad that he was either a Provisional IRA or Chechnyan sniper specially imported for the task. Palestinain national hero, Thaer Hamad, fondly known as "The Sniper" throughout Palestine and further abroad was arrested on Oct 5th 2004 and is now serving multiple life sentences for his resistance to the, inhuman, Israeli occupation of his land, two, it is reported, commuted for the mercy shown to the "settler" woman and her children.? As editor-in-chief, Hafez Barghouti of Al-Hayat Al-Jadida put it: "This young man should be our top priority, since he entered the history of the Intifada as having carried out the most successful military action, alone... Thaer Hamed deserves freedom because he is the hero of the Intifada, and he is the only Palestinian resistance fighter who belongs to his people and to his land, spurning the factions, for had he been factional, he would not have succeeded in his action. He acted alone, going out to play solo on the M-1, and did what tens of brigades and platoons, and hundreds of missiles and heroic stories, failed to do. He is made of the same stuff as those who carried out the capture of Shalit, a military action that was successful by any military yardstick, and now he should be freed." See Philip Weiss's article on Mondoweiss's : The legend of the Silwad sniper http://mondoweiss.net/2010/09/the-leg...
