While many in the West bemoaned the trade of Gilad Shalit for 1000 Palestinian prisoners, part of the deal apparently involved a future player to be named later. That player was the mastermind behind Shalit’s capture – Zuhair al-Qaissi.

Via the Telegraph:

Zuhair al-Qaissi, the commander of the armed wing of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), a Hamas-aligned militant group, was targeted in a midday strike as his car rolled through Gaza City.

His son-in-law and another aide also died in the attack while Israel’s military said it killed two more militants in a separate operation.
The strike is the highest-profile in Gaza for months and sparked an immediate burst of retaliatory rocket fire as well as fears that the violence may escalate in coming days.

Militant groups responded by firing dozens of rockets and mortar rounds into southern Israel, reportedly injuring four people.

Israel said al-Qaissi was plotting an attack similar to the raids in August last year, where four groups of militants crossed over the border from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and killed six civilians and two members of the security forces.

Aside from the trade equating to a reality that says Palestinians place 1/1000 the value on their people’s lives that Israel places on its own people, Israel appears to have gotten something else as a result of al-Qaissi’s murder – a dried up money source for Hezbollah.

Al-Qaissi was reportedly also in charge of funneling money the Lebanese group Hezbollah to militant organisations in Gaza. His predecessor, Kamal Nairab, was killed by a similar Israeli strike seven months ago.

Is it possible that Israel had been tracking al-Qaissi the entire time? Yes, quite possible. Is it possible that his murder may actually give Israel the better end of the deal when the saving of future lives is factored in?

Possibly so.

Yet, at the end of the day, the Palestinians still view the lives of their own as being worth far less than how the Israelis view the lives of THEIR own.

h/t Weasel Zippers