Overnight Tuesday Israeli special forces killed two Palestinian men who were suspected of kidnapping and slaying three Israeli youths abducted in June while hitchhiking in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc of the West Bank. Amer Abu Aisha, 32, and Marwan Qawasmeh, 29, had evaded Israeli forces for over 100 days hiding out in their home city of Hebron no more than five miles from the site of where the remains of Eyal Yifrah, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, 16, were discovered over the summer.

After 1:00 a.m. a team of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), the police counter-terrorism unit, and the Shin Bet surrounded a carpentry shop where the wanted men were hiding in the basement. Cross fire ensued. Abu Aisha and Qawasmeh were armed with military grade automatic weapons, a M16 and an AK47. Israeli forces shot live fire and grenades. “At a certain stage, they came out and opened fire,” said Brigade General Tamir Yadai speaking to the Jerusalem Post, “one was killed on the spot, and one fell into a pit and I assume he was killed,” he continued.

Photographs of the scene from Ma’an News Agency show explosives fired by the Israeli army blew out the street-side first and second story walls of the structure where the men were hiding. After the two were shot, the army tossed grenades into the building, said the Jerusalem Post. The damage to Abu Aisha and Qawasmeh were so significant that their bodies could not be recognized. “The mother of Abu Aisha walked past the body and was also unable to identify it,” reported Ma’an, adding the governor of Hebron called the pair were “executed.”

After daybreak thousands gathered in Hebron for the funerals of the two Palestinians, while the army continued to fire explosives in the neighborhood of the gun battle and at Hebron University. Smoke billowed over the West Bank’s largest city for hours with Israeli forces continuing operations into the morning hours. Like so many other funerals of those killed by Israeli fire—irrespective of their criminal background—after Abu Aisha and Qawasmeh were buried Palestinians clashed with the Israeli army. Ma’an reported 20 were struck with live fire.

A third suspect Husam Qawasmeh (uncle to Marwan Qawasmeh) was indicted in a military court on September 4, 2014 for organizing the kidnappings, after being arrested in July in Jerusalem. And the remaining suspect, Mahmoud Qawasmeh (brother to Husam Qawasmeh and uncle to Marwan Qawasmeh) is currently living in Gaza.

Israeli authorities believe Abu Aisha and Qawasmeh hid in the carpentry shop were they were killed for less than a week. Initially Abu Aisha and Qawasmeh spent their first five days after the abduction holed up in a covered cesspool surviving by breathing through a pipe. In the three-month manhunt to track them down, Israeli forces launched Operation Brother’s Keeper, the largest military operation in the West Bank in over a decade.

While police now say they knew within the first few days the identities of the perpetrators and that there were only four persons involved in the crime, more than 400 were arrested during Operation Brother’s Keeper. As well, after the bodies of the three Israeli youths were discovered nearly a month after they were taken, Israeli forces detonated explosives in apartments of the Abu Aisha and Qawasmeh family homes in Hebron. When I visited the two homes on July 1, 2014–hours after they were exploded–there were no men left in the Abu Aisha house. All of them living in the four-unit building had been arrested, and the night before relatives said soldiers had asked the Shin Bet official with them if they could “arrest the women.”

In the Qawasmeh family, despite Marwan being the suspect, the army destroyed his brother’s home instead. The Israeli policy of punitive home demolitions had been retired as a mode of deterring violent crimes against Israel after the second Intifada. Coincidentally, the day before the army demolished the two apartments the High Court met to rule on reinstating the practice.