Most-Wanted Terrorist in Israel Killed

The Hamas Islamic movement’s top bomb maker, blamed for the slayings of scores of Israelis in a wave of suicide bus explosions, was killed Friday in the Palestinian-ruled Gaza Strip, allegedly by Israeli undercover agents.

Yehiya Ayash, known as “The Engineer,” was Israel’s most-wanted terrorist. He had been on the lam for three years and narrowly escaped several Israeli attempts to capture or kill him.

Palestinian officials condemned the killing of Ayash as an Israeli “military intervention” in the autonomous area.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat offered his condolences to Hamas leaders, who often have been his nemesis in the peace process with Israel.

Hamas militants, meanwhile, called Arafat an accomplice to the assassination and vowed revenge against Israel. From the loudspeakers of mosques in Gaza and the West Bank, they hailed the 30-year-old Ayash as a hero and martyr.

While Israel would never officially acknowledge that it carried out the assassination, security sources unofficially confirmed the killing to Israeli reporters.

Ayash was killed by a blast from explosives planted in a mobile telephone, according to Israeli television. His autopsy report at Shifa Hospital in Gaza lists the cause of death as an explosion to the right side of the face.

Israeli political leaders and political analysts reacted with glee to the news of the “elimination” of Ayash, who randomly targeted Israelis in a bombing campaign against Arafat’s 1993 peace agreement with Israel.

“I can only say one thing,” said Moshe Shahal, Israel’s minister of internal security. “We certainly breathe easier from the fact that Yehiya Ayash is no longer. . . . He who lives by the sword, dies [by the sword]. I think he deserved it.”

Eight attacks in the last two years, most of them against public buses, are attributed to Ayash’s handiwork in explosives, including especially deadly attacks in Tel Aviv, Beit Lid junction, Ramat Gan and Jerusalem. In addition to the Palestinian suicide bombers, at least 76 people died and more than 350 were wounded in these explosions meant to torpedo the peace process.

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Under the peace accord, Arafat assumed control of Gaza and the West Bank town of Jericho in 1994 and took over major West Bank cities and villages in recent months. Gaza and the cities are ruled by Palestinian authorities, and Israeli security is not supposed to operate there.

As word of Ayash’s death spread among Israelis and Palestinians, Israeli police and military officers were called back to work on the Jewish Sabbath, and a general police alert was declared. Israeli automobiles were prohibited from entering many Palestinian self-ruled areas in the West Bank, and Palestinian police were put on alert for possible disturbances.

Arafat also called an emergency meeting of his military and security advisors.

Hundreds of Palestinians surrounded the apartment where Ayash was killed in the Beit Lahiya neighborhood on the northern end of Gaza.

Dr. Mahmoud Zahar, a spokesman for Hamas in Gaza and a relative moderate in the movement, urged the crowd to keep calm and allow Palestinian police to do their work.

Afterward, Arafat went to Zahar’s home in Gaza City with police and Palestinian officials to offer his condolences to the Hamas official, who spent several weeks in a Gaza jail last year under Arafat’s orders.

The assassination of Ayash would be a political boon for Shin Bet, the internal security agency that is under fire for its failure to prevent the Nov. 4 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist opposed to the peace process.

Palestinian officials denied the killing for hours while they apparently figured out how to handle the news. Although the assassination eliminates one of Arafat’s political enemies--which is useful to Arafat in the long run--it is an embarrassment for him that Israeli agents would kill a Palestinian in Palestinian territory.

The killing comes at the outset of the campaign for Palestinian elections for an 88-member governing council and executive leader on Jan. 20.

Ahmed Suleiman Khoury, the Palestinians’ chief negotiator with the Israelis, was quoted on Palestinian radio as calling the assassination an “unacceptable Israeli military intervention” and saying it will hurt Arafat and candidates from his Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Arafat and his candidates face some opposition in the vote but have been widely expected to win by a landslide.

The PLO chief tried to get Hamas to abandon its armed struggle against Israel and participate in the elections, but negotiations fell apart two weeks ago in Cairo.

Hamas had agreed, however, that it would not urge its followers to boycott the vote, and it is unclear now whether that agreement will stand after the assassination.

Hamas is a divided movement, and political analysts expect the most radical wing to carry out its threat of revenge, even though terrorist attacks have been losing them support among Palestinians.

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After Fathi Shikaki, the founder of the Islamic Jihad movement, was gunned down by alleged agents of the Israeli Mossad in Malta in October, the group launched a double suicide bombing against Israeli buses in Gaza. Eleven Israelis were injured in the attack, but none died.

“As far as we know, Ayash has students--followers--and they are well-trained,” said Menachem Klein, an expert on the Islamic group at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv’s Bar Ilan University. “How and where to implement the retaliatory attack is their problem.”

Ayash, the eldest son of a laborer from the West Bank village of Rafat, gained an almost mythical reputation among young Palestinians who admired him and Israelis who feared him.

He was seen as a skilled explosives expert and a chameleon who always managed to evade Israeli agents trying to hunt him down.

He is said to have moved around disguised as an Orthodox Jew in a skullcap and as an Islamic woman in modest dress.

In an interview in July, Ayash’s mother said she sent him to Bir Zeit University in the West Bank so that he would better his life and his family’s lot. Instead, the chemical engineering student joined the war against Zionism and turned to assassinations.

Last April, Ayash reportedly left a Gaza City apartment building just half an hour before it blew up, killing his deputy in what was believed to be an Israeli operation. Before that, Ayash also reportedly left another house in the Nablus area minutes before Israeli commandos surrounded it and blew it up with antitank missiles.

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Israeli police detained Ayash’s 50-year-old mother, Aisha, for 42 days last September for questioning on the whereabouts of her son. Ayash’s brother, Mar’i, 27, also was held for three months for questioning, and the family was celebrating his release when they received news of Ayash’s death.

His mother collapsed with shock while his father, Abdel-Latif Ayash, said, “If he is dead, then God bless his soul. If he had acquired martyrdom, then congratulations to him.”

Ayash’s funeral is to be held today with the Islamic noon prayers in Gaza. Arafat gave his consent for a mass rally to be held, and there was some speculation he might attend.

Hamas circulated leaflets calling Arafat an accomplice to the murder.

Jamil Hamami, a Hamas leader in the West Bank, said the killing by Israelis was “very dangerous because it means the Palestinian Authority cannot provide security and stability for Palestinians and has no control in its areas.”

In Israel, even opponents of the government applauded the action.

Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the opposition Likud Party, said he welcomed the announcement because “that degenerate murdered many innocent people, children, old people, women tourists, Arabs, Jews. . . . The terrorists will know that they have no shelter, that we will find them wherever they are.”

Times special correspondents Ala Meshrawi in Gaza and Summer Assad in the West Bank contributed to this report.