PALIS KIDNAP, RELEASE AMERICAN JEW

American Kidnapped by Palestinians in West Bank Released Unharmed - Yaakov Katz
American-Jewish student Benjamin Bright-Fishbein, an exchange student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was released unharmed Sunday after he was kidnapped by Palestinian gunmen while visiting Nablus on Saturday. Earlier, the kidnappers delivered a videotape to Reuters showing the 20-year-old student holding his Hebrew University ID and saying that he had been abducted. On tape he said his captors had threatened to kill him if Israel did not release Palestinian prisoners. In the end, after apparently realizing they were holding a U.S. citizen, the captors handed Bright-Fishbein over to the PA Preventive Security Service which then transferred him to the IDF. The kidnappers, the IDF said, were affiliated with the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party. (Jerusalem Post)

Palestinian gunmen hand over abducted American citizen to IDF (Haaretz)
Members of an armed Fatah militia which claimed to have kidnapped an Israeli Saturday transferred the individual in question, a U.S. citizen, to the custody of the Palestinian Authority before dawn Sunday.The PA security forces subsequently handed the American over to the Israel Defense Forces. Defense officials believe once the militants discovered the person was indeed an American citizen, they took steps to end the matter quickly."Apparently, the kidnappers did not want to end up like Zarqawi," a defense official said.