[1] In December 1987, with the beginning of the first intifada, Hamas was founded by Muslim Brotherhood members and was headed by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Mohammad Taha.
Hamas sent out feelers, via talks with Shimon Peres, in early 1988 offering an acknowledgement of Israel in exchange for a return to the 1967 borders, but soon discarded negotiations in favour of armed resistance, to clearly demarcate the difference between its position and that of Palestinian nationalists.
The other squad members were Abed Rabo Abu Jose, co-founder of Hamas' military wing, Muhammad Nazim Nasser.
[citation needed] On February 16, 1989, Sasportas got in a vehicle carrying two Hamas militants disguised as Israeli Jewish ultra-orthodox men, who beat him to death shortly thereafter.
Mahmoud Naser and Mohammad sat in the vehicle, disguised as Israeli Jewish ultra orthodox men, and invited the soldiers to join them on a ride towards Ashkelon.
[citation needed] A month after the abduction, a large campaign of arrests was conducted by the Israeli Defense Forces in the Gaza Strip.
[citation needed] During the following years, whenever new bits of information or speculations were revealed, targeted searches were conducted with the aim of finding Saadoun's body.
[citation needed] After the Oslo Accords, PA officials attempted to locate the burial place of Ilan Saadon's body.
The investigators team compared the maps drawn, with aerial photos taken during the period of the killing, and managed to mark a number of possible sites in which Saadon may have been buried.
The team was assisted by additional photographs, advanced instruments, and interviews with designers and builders of the road, and managed to establish a new approximate location of the burial site of Ilan Saadon.
The family of Ilan Saadon expressed strong opposition to this option, but he was released on October 18, 2011, as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap deal.
[6] On November 19, 2001, a Golani Brigade force captured squad member Abed-Rabo Abu Jose in the Sg'aih neighborhood in Gaza.
[2] According to a Hamas statement, Al-Mabhouh had been involved in the 1989 abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers, Avi Sasportas and Ilan Sa'adon, whose murders he celebrated by standing on one of their corpses.
[7][8] In a video taped two weeks before his death, and broadcast on Al-Jazeera in early February 2010, Mabhouh admitted his involvement, saying he had disguised himself as an Orthodox Jew.