Israel Kills 6th Militant in ‘War to Bitter End’

Israeli helicopters swooped down Friday evening on a car carrying a Hamas activist, killing him and injuring nearly two dozen bystanders in what Israeli officials are calling a war without compromise against the militant Palestinian group.

The Gaza Strip attack was the fifth in four days against Hamas, which has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Israelis since the outbreak of fighting nearly 33 months ago.

“As a government responsible for the security of its citizens, we must wage a war to the bitter end, because no one else, at least at this stage, will do it,” Israel’s deputy defense minister, Zeev Boim, told Army Radio. Other officials have used similar language in closed-door meetings in recent days.

Against the backdrop of rising violence, the Bush administration has dispatched envoy John S. Wolf to the region, along with monitors to oversee efforts to implement the American-backed peace plan known as the “road map.”

Officials in Washington urged both sides to show restraint in a week that has also seen several Palestinian attacks, one of which took the lives of 17 Israelis on a crowded bus in downtown Jerusalem.

The death in Gaza City of Fuad Ihdawi, described by the Israeli military as an important Hamas field activist, was the latest in what the Israelis are calling “targeted killings” of Palestinian militants.

The campaign began with an unsuccessful missile strike Tuesday against Abdulaziz Rantisi, a senior leader and co-founder of Hamas, who escaped with moderate injuries when Apache helicopter gunships annihilated his SUV at a busy Gaza City intersection.

The next day, an 18-year-old Palestinian suicide bomber blew up the Jerusalem bus. Among the fatalities were a young engaged couple; 80 were wounded.

In the days since the attack on Rantisi, six Hamas activists have been killed, all while traveling in their cars in Gaza City. At least a dozen Palestinian bystanders have been killed, and scores have been injured.

“I wanted to escape, but I was hit by something hot in my legs,” said Mohammed Rashid, a 14-year-old Palestinian boy who was walking on the street close to the site of Friday evening’s missile strike. “I couldn’t hear anything ... and then our neighbor came and took me to the hospital.”

Later Friday, in the same neighborhood, Israeli gunships rocketed a small structure adjoining a home belonging to a Hamas supporter who runs a popular restaurant in Gaza City, Palestinian witnesses said. No injuries were reported.

Hamas, which has said that there will be no safety in Israel for either Israelis or foreigners, vowed anew to step up its attacks. The organization opposes the existence of Israel.

“This comprehensive Zionist escalation will push the Palestinian people to defend themselves by all available means and capabilities,” said Hamas spokesman Ismail Haniyeh. “As long as there is aggression and assassination against the Palestinian people, they have a right to strike out.”

With Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas out of the country for medical treatment for what aides described as an eye problem, President Yasser Arafat has been taking an increasingly active role, holding security consultations Friday at his bombarded headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

The Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City, where the latest Israeli airstrike took place, was not far from the home of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas. Israeli officials have warned that no one associated with the group, including him, is immune from punishment for attacks against Israelis.

Some of the Israeli strikes at Hamas members this week were said to be aimed at neutralizing the group’s ability to fire homemade rockets into Israel. But in an apparent gesture of defiance, two more Kassam rockets were launched from the northern Gaza Strip toward Israeli towns on Friday, causing property damage but no injuries.

Meanwhile Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell urged Palestinians to exercise restraint and called other leaders, including the foreign minister of Syria, asking them to use their influence to halt attacks by Palestinian militants.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for an armed peacekeeping force to separate Israel from the occupied territories, a proposal the Bush administration quickly rejected.

A day earlier, Powell had called for restraint by the Israeli government. But amid an outcry from congressional Democrats and U.S. supporters of Israel, he declined to repeat those remarks and instead called on the Palestinians to halt their attacks.

“All of our efforts are focused on Hamas and persuading Hamas and Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations that this is the time to abandon terror,” Powell said Friday.

“We are anxious to see restraint and we understand that it’s important to get the terror down,” he said. “If the terror goes down, then the response to terror will no longer be required.”

On Thursday, Powell had telephoned the foreign ministers of Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Abbas and EU High Representative Javier Solano, said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher. On Friday, Powell spoke with Annan and called Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh to ask Syria to cut off money and support for Palestinian militants.

Powell asked each leader, “What can you do, what can each of the parties do, what can we do to stop the violence?” Boucher said.

White House officials pointedly declined to criticize Israeli attacks on Hamas officials. At the same time, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the Israeli response must not endanger the peace plan.

“Israel has to remember, as it fights terror, its obligations to preserve the overall road map and peace process,” Fleischer said. “But no one has said or [is] suggesting that terrorists should be able to get away with killing, and do so with impunity.”

Fleischer was also careful to distinguish between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority headed by Abbas, whom he praised for his efforts to rein in militants.

“The issue is not Israel. The issue is not Prime Minister Abbas. The issue is not the Palestinian Authority. The issue is the terrorists -- Hamas and others,” Fleischer said.

Boucher said the idea of NATO or other peacekeepers in the Middle East has been floated for 15 years, but peacekeepers would not succeed absent the political will by the parties themselves to end the conflict.

Fleischer said that President Bush is following the situation closely while he enjoys Fathers Day weekend with his parents in Kennebunkport, Maine.

The Israeli public has long tacitly supported the “targeted killings” of Palestinian militants, but there are growing signs of dissent over the tactic at this sensitive juncture.

A poll in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot showed that 58% of those surveyed wanted assassinations halted, at least temporarily, to give the Palestinian leadership a chance to grow stronger and combat armed factions on its own.

Abbas declared at last week’s summit with Sharon in Aqaba, Jordan, presided over by President Bush, that the Palestinians’ armed uprising must come to an end, and he has been trying to negotiate a cease-fire with Hamas and similar groups.

But the bloodshed continues.

An Israeli soldier was shot to death Friday evening in the West Bank city of Jenin, according to military sources. The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militant wing of Arafat’s Fatah faction that has been jostling for prominence with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, claimed responsibility.

Earlier in the day, gunmen seriously wounded two female Jewish settlers in a roadside ambush in the northern West Bank.

Israel, for its part, escalated punitive measures against those who stage such attacks. Outside the West Bank town of Hebron, in the village of Dura, Israeli troops demolished the family home of a militant with the Tanzim, a Fatah offshoot, who Israeli authorities said had carried out several shootings.

In Gaza City, thousands took to the sandy streets for the funerals of Hamas leader Yasser Taha and his wife and baby daughter. Taha, a member of a prominent Hamas family, was targeted by Israeli helicopters as he drove through a crowded neighborhood Thursday.

In the squalid Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, mourners Friday hoisted aloft the corpse of Taha’s 11-month-old daughter, Afnan, wrapped in a white shroud but with her blackened face exposed. Her body, like the coffin of her 21-year-old mother, Islam, was cradled in a green Hamas flag.

Mourners fired rifles into the air and chanted while loudspeakers blared a Hamas song. Fawzia Abdullah, the 40-year-old mother of the dead woman, sat surrounded by other women of the camp in her cement-block home, her face swollen with grief.

“She was a good girl,” she said. “I ask only for God’s revenge.”

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Times staff writers Sonni Efron in Washington and Maura Reynolds in Kennebunkport, Maine, contributed to this report.