TEL AVIV, Sept 27: Israel admitted on Friday that a wanted leader of the Hamas military wing had survived a Gaza rocket attack, as the army pressed on with its crackdown on the radical group and killed one of its West Bank militants.
The focus of Israel’s military operations shifted to the Gaza Strip as an adviser to Arafat Yasser predicted Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would give up his demand for the surrender of wanted men besieged with the Palestinian leader in his West Bank offices.
Mohammad Deif, an alleged bombmaker for the Ezzedin al-Qassam Brigades, was only moderately wounded in Thursday’s helicopter strike on a car in a crowded area of Gaza City that killed two fellow Hamas members, an Israeli minister said.
“The information I have been getting from our services shows he has been injured but that his life is not in danger,” said Sports Minister Matan Vilnai, a member of Israel’s security cabinet.
Confusion had followed the raid, which also injured 25 Palestinians, including 10 children, after the Israeli security services said they were “99 percent sure” Deif was dead, a claim Hamas denied immediately.
On Friday afternoon, more than 20,000 Palestinians demonstrated in the streets of the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Yunis, where the two slain militants were from, firing shots in the air and vowing bloody revenge.
“We will come back to Tel Aviv and the rest of Israel for martyr operations,” some demonstrators chanted, pledging to continue suicide attacks “until the end of Israeli occupation”.
Deif, 36, is the highest-profile Hamas militant on Israel’s wanted list.
A disciple of Yahya Ayash — the bombmaker nicknamed “The Engineer” who was killed in a 1995 assassination using a mobile phone — Deif took over from Salah Shehade, whom Israel killed in July.
Vilnai implied the army could have killed Deif had it used the same methods which killed Shehade. “Means which would undoubtedly have killed him, together with dozens of other people, could have been used,” he said.
The one-ton bomb dropped by an F-16 which killed Shehade, his bodyguard and 15 civilians, drew a barrage of international criticism and sparked a new wave of retaliatory suicide attacks.
The latest raid — which was condemned by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan — was only the latest of a string of military operations in Gaza, amid Palestinian fears that Israel is preparing to invade and reoccupy the densely-populated Strip, as it has nearly all of the West Bank since June.
Some 30 armoured vehicles raided an autonomous area in the central Gaza Strip on Thursday night, sparking clashes in which two Palestinians were wounded, Palestinian medical sources said.—AFP