by Samuel Messidor
A lone fighter took to the hills around Ramallah in the West Bank in the early hours of March 29, where he engaged Israeli special forces before ultimately being killed by strafing fire from an Apache attack helicopter.
Mujahed Barakat Mansour killed one Israeli soldier and wounded seven others using a World War I-era rifle from prepared firing positions in the hills. He downed two drones and escaped suicide drones and grenade attacks, evading the Israelis for 5 hours.
Mansour was a veteran of the Palestinian Authority’s Presidential Guard, an elite force trained by the US which was used in the battle to clear Hamas from the West Bank after the party won the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections and came into the government of Gaza.
The Palestinian Authority is a collaborator regime widely condemned and hated by the Palestinian people. It has been working to keep down the armed liberation struggle in the West Bank, while the Palestinian resistance has called for the people of the West Bank to rise up. The actions of Mansour in Ramallah as a lone fighter are spectacular, but they are not unique. They are notable because it was one of the PA’s own who carried out the attack, revealing cracks in the collaborator regime’s façade.
The BBC, among other monopoly media organizations, has sneered at the resistance, claiming the West Bank has not risen up in struggle against the Zionist regime. This is false—the Palestinian people are engaging in mass demonstrations and the resistance organizations in the West Bank, like the Jenin Brigades, have carried out hundreds of armed actions against Israeli soldiers, checkpoints, and militarized settlers since Al Aqsa Flood.
photo: Israeli surveillance drone footage of Mansour during his engagement with IDF special forces. He lines up a shot and downs the drone.
