Sharon Lauds Hebron Killing

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Sunday expressed satisfaction with Israel’s latest killing of a Hamas leader, but Secretary of State Colin L. Powell cautioned that such actions could prove an “impediment to progress” toward implementing the troubled U.S.-backed peace plan.

Powell’s comments came as he met in neighboring Jordan with architects of the plan, known as the “road map.” The mediators urged all parties to continue talks to try to overcome what has been a rocky start for the initiative.

Sounding much like the army field commander he was for so many years, Sharon praised his troops for hunting down Abdullah Kawasme, wanted for allegedly masterminding a string of Palestinian suicide bombings. Kawasme was gunned down Saturday night outside a mosque in the West Bank town of Hebron, where he was the head of the local branch of Hamas’ military wing, Izzidin al-Qassam.

“I would like to thank the security forces for last night’s successful and very important action in Hebron,” the prime minister told his Cabinet on Sunday. “This was a vital action designed to provide security for Israel’s citizens.”

From the earliest weeks of the 33-month-old Palestinian uprising, Israel has carried out what it calls “targeted killings” -- more than 150 of them, by the count of human rights groups -- of Palestinian militants who it said were involved in planning or preparing to carry out suicide bombings, shootings, ambushes and other attacks against Israelis.

Israeli human rights groups, one of which has lodged a legal appeal against the practice, say most of these deaths can only be considered extrajudicial executions.

“It’s essentially taking someone and imposing the death penalty on him without giving him an opportunity to defend himself in court,” said Hannah Friedman, executive director of the Committee Against Torture, which is scheduled to argue its case before the Israeli Supreme Court next month. “It’s not right.”

To a greater degree than some recent Israeli targets, the 43-year-old Kawasme appeared to fit the profile of a “ticking bomb” -- someone who poses an imminent danger unless stopped by whatever means necessary.

He headed the Hamas cell in Hebron, a tight-knit group of young men, some of them soccer buddies, blamed by Israel for carrying out attacks that have killed 35 Israelis and injured nearly 150 others. The latest of these was a suicide bombing on a bus in the heart of Jerusalem on June 11, a week after the peace plan was launched, which left 17 Israelis dead.

Israel did not disclose specific intelligence pointing to another imminent attack by the Hebron cell but said Kawasme had played a key role in its activities. He was believed to have served as both an “engineer” -- a bomb maker -- as well as a handler of young charges, recruiting and then dispatching them on deadly missions.

Kawasme was a “classical ticking bomb -- in fact, a whole assembly line of ticking bombs,” Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told Israel’s Cabinet on Sunday, according to an official who was present at the closed-door session.

In some respects, the Kawasme case is murky because it is not clear that Israel deliberately set out to kill him. The army says arrest was its preferred option -- “that was the aim here,” an Israeli security source said.

The most likely scenario, according to observers familiar with such operations, is that the troops were told to bring Kawasme in if they could, but to kill him without hesitation if they encountered resistance.

Walking into Israeli commandos’ carefully laid trap, Kawasme was mortally wounded before he had a chance to fire a shot, according to Palestinian witnesses. Israeli security sources said he was armed with an M-16 assault rifle and a pistol, and he brandished at least one weapon but did not open fire.

No bystanders were hurt, despite the fact that Kawasme was targeted in a crowded city center.

Israeli security officials expressed satisfaction at having kept this strike “surgical” -- which is far easier to do, one military source noted, when the weapons involved are automatic rifles rather than helicopter-fired missiles. Those were used in a wave of strikes against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip earlier this month, which killed six of the seven targeted men but also killed more than a dozen passersby and wounded scores more.

Hamas is well aware that the targeted killings -- and most crucially, their timing -- have driven a wedge between the United States and Israel.

From the beginning of the still-nascent peace process, President Bush and Sharon appeared to have had fundamentally different understandings of what would trigger the decision to carry out such a killing.

The U.S. administration seemed caught off guard by Israel’s June 10 attempt to kill Abdulaziz Rantisi, a high-profile Hamas official who had long been viewed as a political leader, primarily serving as spokesman for the group.

The strike was all the more inflammatory for coming just six days after the summit at which the peace plan was launched. Even many Israelis who would have been happy to see Rantisi dead were aghast at the timing -- a sentiment that was underscored by the bus bombing in Jerusalem the next day.

Israeli intelligence officials said they doubted the bus bombing was in direct retaliation for the attempted killing because it would have taken days to plan and prepare, but the public perception of the strike at Rantisi was that of a costly blunder.

Hamas, which has never recognized Israel’s right to exist, issued fiery new threats Sunday to retaliate for Kawasme’s killing, but at the same time it appeared to be keeping its political options open.

“If Palestinian blood is spilled, Zionist blood will be spilled too,” Rantisi vowed.

However, the group said Sunday evening that it was still weighing a possible cease-fire, which the Palestinian Authority has been trying to negotiate. One of Hamas’ key demands is an end to the campaign of what it calls assassinations.

Complicating the debate over Israel’s actions is the U.S. targeting of figures such as Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, said Moshe Negbi, a teacher at Hebrew University and a prominent commentator on Israeli legal affairs.

“Probably Israeli decision-makers feel there couldn’t be much American pressure because of such actions, so it’s easier for them to carry out these operations,” he said.

In Jordan, the four architects of the road map to peace -- the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia -- called on all parties to end the escalating cycle of violence.

They condemned “the brutal terror attacks” that Hamas and other extremist groups have waged against Israelis but said the Israeli military’s killing of “Palestinian civilians” undermines “trust and prospects for cooperation.”

Powell has consistently spoken of Israel’s right to self-defense in the fight against terror, but Sunday again urged Israel to confine itself to targeting “ticking bombs.” He declined to say whether he considered Kawasme to have been such a case.

“I regret that we continue to find ourselves trapped in this action and counter-action, provocation and reaction to provocation,” Powell told reporters in Jordan. “I regret that we had an incident that could be an impediment to progress.”

But so sensitive is the subject that the American ambassador to Israel, Daniel Kurtzer, later called Israeli officials to offer a clarification, Israeli news reports said. Kurtzer reportedly assured the prime minister’s office that Powell was not criticizing the killing of Kawasme but expressing sorrow that the conflict led to such measures being taken.

Left in perhaps the most difficult position by Israel’s targeting of Hamas leaders is Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. His lieutenants accuse Israel of trying to sabotage cease-fire talks -- and by extension, the peace process as a whole -- through its campaign of targeted killings.

“These are people who do not want to see the dialogue [with militant groups] succeed,” said Nabil Amr, the Palestinian information minister.

Tensions stemming from the killings have also cast a pall over separate talks between the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority on the proposed pullback of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Bethlehem.

The two sides have been deadlocked over whether Israel would retain control over Gaza’s main north-south roadway once security control had been handed over to the Palestinians. Reports said the United States had put forth a proposal that the two sides were considering on Sunday night: having joint patrols along the road.

But as so often happens, the talks were paralleled by violence on the ground. Three Palestinian men were killed late Sunday in the northern Gaza Strip by a shell fired from an Israeli tank positioned along that main road, Palestinian officials said.

Palestinian security sources identified them as members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militant offshoot of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction. The area where they were killed has been a staging ground for militant groups firing homemade rockets at Israeli settlements and towns just outside the Gaza Strip.

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Times staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this report from the Dead Sea, Jordan.