Israel Says It Caught a 'Major' Arms Dealer Near Tulkarm

Israeli soldiers arrested a man the military described as a "major" dealer in weapons in Tulkarm, a Palestinian city in the northern West Bank, the Israel Defense Forces said on Sunday 30 November 2025. The arrest was made by fighters of Duvdevan (the Hebrew word means "cherry"), an army counter-terrorism unit that operates in civilian clothing, working under the direction of the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency.

According to the IDF statement, the man, named as Ahmed Nasrallah, was captured in the area of Artah, a village on the outskirts of Tulkarm. The statement released to the press did not describe what weapons, if any, were recovered, whether anyone was hurt during the operation, or where Nasrallah was taken afterwards.

The unit that wears no uniform

Duvdevan is formally Unit 217, part of the Israeli army's Commando Brigade, and belongs to a family of Israeli units known as mistaaravim: operators trained to blend into Arabic-speaking civilian settings and make arrests in crowded urban areas without a visible military build-up, according to the reference entry on the unit. The unit is regularly named in Israeli reporting on West Bank arrest raids; the Times of Israel identified Duvdevan commandos as the force involved in a separate operation near Jenin five days earlier.

Why Tulkarm has been at the centre of Israeli operations

Tulkarm lies in the northern West Bank, close to the boundary with Israel, and has been one of the main theatres of a large Israeli campaign in the northern West Bank. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded that Operation Iron Wall began on 21 January 2025 in Jenin and quickly widened to Tulkarm and Tubas, using helicopters, air strikes and, for the first time since the early 2000s, tanks. In its report published in July 2025, OCHA described the resulting displacement as the largest in the West Bank since 1967, with UNRWA verifying at least 29,338 refugees displaced from three camps by May 2025.

Human Rights Watch, in a report published on 20 November 2025, put the number displaced from the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams camps at around 32,000, and counted more than 850 buildings demolished or heavily damaged in six months. Israel says the operation targets armed networks in the camps.

The West Bank's homemade gun trade

Arms dealing in the West Bank is dominated less by smuggled military rifles than by improvised submachine guns known as "Carlos", copied loosely from a Swedish design. As the Times of Israel reported in 2016, they can be built in a small workshop with a drill press, welding gear and blueprints downloaded from the internet, and one recorded example used a length of commercial water pipe as its barrel. Prices quoted at the time ran from roughly 3,000 shekels for a crude smoothbore version to 15,000 for a rifled one, against 60,000 to 80,000 shekels for a genuine M16, economics that make workshops easy to replace whenever Israel shuts one down.

What is still unclear

The military's announcement was two sentences long. It did not say what evidence underlies the description of Nasrallah as a "major" arms dealer, whether he had been charged with anything, or whether weapons or manufacturing equipment were seized. It also did not say whether the Artah operation involved gunfire, and no Palestinian account of the arrest was included in the statement.