/ 10 March 2003

Restraint is dead, warns Hamas

Hamas has accused Israel of launching a strategy to assassinate Palestinian leaders who oppose Ariel Sharon’s plans to impose an emasculated form of independence on the occupied territories.

The militant Islamist organisation described the Israeli helicopter rocket attack that killed one of its co-founders, Ibrahim Makadme, in Gaza on Saturday as a marked shift towards the targeting of its political leaders. Hamas said it would retaliate directly against Sharon, his cabinet and government officials.

”This opens new doors,” said Mahmoud Zahar, a senior leader of Hamas’s political wing. ”All Israeli officials have fixed addresses. We will hit them in their homes, offices, cars. We are going to respond according to the proverb: an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose.”

The Israeli army described Makadme as a ”terror policy maker” and a ”central figure who instigated, directed and approved the Hamas military operations” for 20 years.

Hamas denies it, saying that Makadme was one of its principal political strategists. But, at the very least, he was a bridge between the two wings of the organisation.

What was not in doubt among the tens of thousands of people who followed Makadme’s funeral cortege through Gaza is that the assassination has stung Hamas and that it views the Israelis as having crossed a threshold.

The two sides have maintained an informal but unacknowledged agreement through most of the past two years of intifada in which the Israelis did not touch the Hamas political leadership and Hamas limited its attacks on Israeli civilians inside the 1967 borders. Yasser Arafat and the Egyptian government pressed Hamas without success to formalise the arrangement as a ”ceasefire”.

The first hint of an end to the de facto immunity came last week when Israeli troops arrested another of the organisation’s co-founders, Mohammed Taha, during an army raid on Gaza’s El-Bureij refugee camp. Three of Taha’s sons were also detained and eight other Palestinians killed.

That raid followed weeks of relative peace in Israel but which saw a surge in bloodshed in the occupied territories with dozens of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa Brigade commanders killed in army raids, as well as many civilians. Hamas fought back with a bomb attack on a tank in Gaza that killed four Israeli soldiers.

While no civilians were killed inside Israel last month, more than 80 Palestinians died at the hands of the army, including at least a dozen children. The bloodshed returned to Israel proper last week with a Hamas suicide bombing on a Haifa bus that killed 16 people.

Hamas officials say that as Makadme lived openly, working as a dentist in the Islamic University’s clinical department, the decision to kill him must have been a political, not a military one.

Yesterday, Israel’s hawkish defence minister, General Shaul Mofaz, confirmed that the government and army no longer drew a distinction between Hamas’s political and military leaders. ”None of the terrorist leaders, with emphasis on Hamas leaders, is immune. Anyone who encourages terrorism, dispatches terrorism or is involved in terrorism will be hit,” he said.

”Hamas, especially in Gaza, has become an unrestrained monster of terrorism, and there is a fear that it will keep getting stronger and control everything done in the Gaza Strip.”

At a memorial service at the Islamic University yesterday, Hamas leaders spoke of a strategy to dispose of its political leadership because it refused to be drawn into Israel’s attempts to impose an emasculated Palestinian state on the occupied territories.

A leader of Hamas’s military wing, Abu Sabbah, noted that Sharon and Gen Mofaz yesterday praised the nomination of Yasser Arafat’s deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, to be Palestinian prime minister.

The Israelis favour Abbas because he has consistently condemned attacks on Israeli civilians and is thought likely to bring an early end to the intifada.

But Abu Sabbah said Abbas’s appeal to the Israelis was that he is pliable and likely to agree to a Palestinian state on almost any terms.

”Now the Israelis think that they can impose peace terms on the Palestinians and they are removing those who will reject it,” he said. ”Now we see [Mahmoud Abbas] as prime minister, the man the Israelis want. Why do they want him? Because he will do what they want. But to make that possible they have to remove those of us who will fight against this betrayal. That is why they killed Makadme.”

Abu Sabbah said that following the killing, the Hamas leadership had not so much switched policy with its threat to target Sharon and other government officials as lifted the restraints.

”Hamas didn’t change its policy. The military wing has always put on the table that we should target Sharon and his terrorist cabinet but the political leadership demanded restraint. From today the military wing has a free hand. We can go after who we like,” he said. – Guardian Unlimited Â