Random Slaying Led to Six Months of Tension in Israel : Mideast: Officials say killing of policeman was not part of terrorist plot. But fear and deportations ensued.

The kidnap-murder of an Israeli police sergeant six months ago was not part of a widespread terrorist offensive by Islamic extremists as then believed, Israeli officials disclosed Sunday, but it brought a crackdown that has altered the whole of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

With the four suspects in the killing of Sgt. Maj. Nissim Toledano among the 124 Islamists arrested this spring, Israeli security officials were both congratulating themselves Sunday on their skilled police work and acknowledging how dramatically a very small group of Palestinian militants had changed the course of recent events in the Middle East.

In the wake of Toledano’s murder, Israel exiled 415 suspected supporters of the Islamic Resistance Movement and other fundamentalist groups; Palestinians stepped up their attacks upon Israelis, in both the occupied territories and Israel itself, and Israel responded by closing off the West Bank and Gaza Strip, barring residents from jobs in Israel and raising tensions there.

Marked by escalating violence, the moves and countermoves increased the political stature of radical Islamists in relation to more moderate Palestinian nationalists, heightened Israeli fears about Palestinian autonomy and imperiled Arab-Israeli negotiations on Palestinian self-government.

“What everyone took as a challenging blow in a new terrorist offensive against us was, in reality, a rather uncalculated and badly bungled operation by people who were anything but trained cadres. . . ,” a top Israeli official said Sunday, commenting on the results of an investigation by the General Security Service.

“We effectively handed the fate of the Middle East to four guys, all Islamic radicals in their 20s, whose only thought was to hit our policemen and soldiers, but without really a thought beyond that,” he said.

When the four suspects in the Toledano killing--a hotel plumber, a hospital orderly, a municipal gardener and a writer for an Islamic newspaper--came together last October and decided to attack Israeli policemen and soldiers, they had no grand strategy and, according to Israeli sources, were not even part of Hamas, as the Islamic Resistance Movement is known.

Toledano, a member of the Israeli border police, was a chance victim, according to security officials who interrogated the four men. He was spotted while walking to work in the Israeli town of Lod about 4 a.m. Dec. 13 and run down by the men with their car because they did not have any weapons. Stunned, he was tied up, bundled into the car and driven to the West Bank.

With Toledano as a hostage, the four decided to demand the release of an imprisoned Hamas leader, the men reportedly told police, but they killed the officer early the next morning after concluding that Israeli authorities would not negotiate and that Toledano was a burden, not a prize.

“They had no plan of action, no scenario,” another government official said, asking not to be quoted by name. “They were operating on impulse, on anger, on fear, on the elation at having caught one of us. But that’s all. And this is what set all the other events in motion.”

Although the four had signed their demand for the release of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the imprisoned Hamas founder, with the name of Hamas’ military wing, senior security officials said Sunday that their investigation, including the men’s confessions, had shown they were not then part of Hamas.

Toledano’s murder, coming after a Hamas ambush that killed three Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip and after other attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on the West Bank, nonetheless appeared to be part of a broad offensive by Islamic extremists, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered the roundup and deportation of suspected supporters of the two groups to southern Lebanon.

Israeli officials said at the time that the deportees were leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but not men they could link to specific crimes. While 19 of the deportees have been allowed to return, 396 remain in a tent camp on a barren stretch of southern Lebanon.

The mass expulsion, undertaken without formal charges or trial, was condemned by the international community, and Rabin later cut the initial term of exile, generally two years, in half. Offers to bring back 125 more of the deportees have been rejected by the group, which insists on the immediate return of all.

Security officials who led the investigation into Toledano’s murder acknowledged that the original motive for the expulsions--to break what appeared to be an orchestrated wave of terrorist attacks--was based on faulty evidence and hasty conclusions.

But the subsequent sweep, they said, has netted the suspected killers of 21 of the 24 Israeli soldiers, policemen and civilians killed so far this year in both Israel and the occupied territories.

After Toledano’s murder, the four suspects reportedly contacted Hamas and obtained weapons and money--some of it reportedly raised in the United States--to buy a car. The four are blamed for several subsequent attacks on Israeli police officers and settlers in Israel and the occupied territories. They were also reportedly involved in a car bombing that killed two Palestinians, one reportedly an accomplice, in the Jordan Valley in April.

Security officials said the four men, who were arrested last week, were able to travel freely inside Israel with their identification papers as residents of Arab East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed in 1967. Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been barred from Israel for the past two months.

The leader of the group was identified as Mohammed abu Issa, 25, a journalist for Sawt el Haq, a newspaper promoting Islamic fundamentalism among Israeli Arabs. The other suspects are Mohammed Mahmoud Atwan, 23, a plumber at an East Jerusalem hotel; Moussa Akari, 22, an orderly at Mukassed Hospital in East Jerusalem, and Majed Hassan abu Katesh, 23, a gardener for the city.