The killing of Mahmud Abu Hannud in a rocket attack on his car in the West Bank ensured that the violence will spiral further after a senior figure of the radical Islamic group Hamas promised “hard and imminent” revenge.
And it cast doubts over the prospects for success of two senior US envoys, who are preparing to travel to the Middle East in a bid to hammer out a new ceasefire.
Abu Hannud, a leader of the Hamas military wing, and two associates were killed Friday night when Israeli gunships attacked their car near the village of Yasid.
A statement from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s office Saturday said Abu Hannud “was implicated in a long series of bombing attacks against Israeli citizens ... and in recent days was planning suicide attacks on Israeli territory.”
It accused him of being responsible for two of the bloodiest recent attacks in Israel.
One was a June 1 suicide bombing Tel Aviv in which 21 people, mostly teenagers, were killed. The other, in Al Quds on August 9, left 15 victims.
A Sharon spokesman said the killing of Abu Hannud was “one of the biggest operational successes in the fight against terrorism being conducted by Israel.
“The Palestinian Authority could have arrested him but didn’t do it. We eliminated him and saved many human lives,” Avi Pazner told AFP.
And Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said the assassination was “par excellence, an act of legitimate self-defence.
Israel has an avowed policy of targeting Palestinians it suspects of having carried out or of planning attacks on Israeli targets. Some 60 of them have been killed since the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israeli occupation in September 2000.
A Hamas political bureau member, Ismail Abu Shanab official, promised Saturday “hard and imminent” revenge.
And the armed wing of Hamas, the Ezzedin al-Qassam Brigades, said Israel would “pay the price for the crimes against our fighters.
“We swear by our martyrs that we will continue the jihad (holy war) and the resistance to defend our sacred values, our land and our people until liberation and until we have driven the enemy from our pure land.”
Some 30,000 people gathered in the West Bank City of Jenin for Abu Hannud’s funeral Saturday, with many in the angry crowd shouting for revenge.
The assassination was only one of several deadly incidents on Friday.
Two activists in Arafat’s Fatah faction died in a Palestinian self-rule village in the West Bank in a still-unexplained explosion.
In the Gaza Strip, a 15-year-old Palestinian teenager was fatally shot and five other teenagers wounded by Israeli troops during clashes with stone-throwers and gunmen after the funerals of five schoolboys.
The children, all members of the same extended family and under the age of 14, were killed Thursday by what is thought to have been an Israeli booby-trap in the southern Gaza Strip.
And a man was mortally wounded and five other people injured when tanks opened fire on their car near the Rafah border terminal with Egypt.
An Israeli military source said the vehicle was travelling on a restricted military road, and that the soldiers had first fired warning shots.
The latest deaths brought to 989 the number of people killed since the outbreak of the uprising, including 778 Palestinians and 189 Israelis.—AFP