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JERUSALEM : A top Hamas commander in the West Bank has been arrested by the Israeli security services after more than a decade on the run, an Israeli military spokesman announced on Sunday.
Maher Uda, 47, a senior commander in Hamas' armed wing in the occupied territory, was captured overnight in the West Bank political capital of Ramallah, the spokesman said.
"He had been on the wanted list since the end of the 1990s for his implication in a series of suicide attacks in Israel which claimed 70 lives," the military spokesman told AFP.
Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum said the arrest was "the fruit of dangerous security coordination between the Palestinian Authority and the (Israeli) occupation, because he was wanted and hunted by both parties".
"The continuation of this security coordination is going to bury reconciliation alive because it comes in the context of uprooting Hamas and strengthening Fatah," he told AFP.
A Palestinian security official in the West Bank said his forces did not know of Uda's whereabouts because he had gone underground several years ago and said they had yet to determine where exactly he was arrested.
"If there were an earthquake or a flood in the West Bank, Hamas would blame it on the Palestinian Authority," he said on condition of anonymity.
"They don't want to admit they have informers within their ranks," he added.
Long-running tensions between Hamas and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah party boiled over when the Islamist movement drove his forces from Gaza in June 2007, seizing power in the impoverished coastal enclave.
Since then, each movement has accused the other of persecuting its rivals within the territory under its control.
Palestinian security forces have imposed calm across the West Bank in recent years by ridding the streets of weapons and cracking down on armed groups, but they have denied going after Hamas for political reasons. - AFP/ms
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