Mourners at Hamas Funeral Vow Revenge

Calling for Palestinian unity and revenge against Israel, tens of thousands of mourners turned out Saturday to bury Yehiya Ayash, the Hamas Islamic movement’s mastermind of suicide bombings who was slain in a covert operation widely attributed to Israeli agents.

Thousands more Palestinians poured into the streets of at least four West Bank towns to burn Israeli flags and warn Prime Minister Shimon Peres that they will avenge the death of their “martyr.”

“Peres, don’t get too happy, we are all Yehiya Ayash,” they shouted in Gaza. “Prepare the body bags.”

Israel braced for revenge attacks, putting its forces on high alert, setting up roadblocks around the country and barring its citizens from entering Palestinian-controlled areas.

Israel also imposed an indefinite closure on the Gaza Strip and West Bank, preventing the more than 50,000 Palestinians who work in Israel from going to their jobs today.

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Ayash, dubbed “The Engineer,” whose explosives took the lives of scores of Israelis in the last two years, was killed Friday by a booby-trapped cellular telephone. The master bomb maker reportedly died instantly when the phone, packed with 50 grams of explosives, exploded as he held it to the right side of his head.

Israeli radio and television, citing Palestinian sources, said the telephone had been given to Ayash three days earlier by Osama Hammad, the son of a sheik who owns the apartment where Ayash was staying. Hammad has since disappeared from Gaza, and Palestinians believe that he is in Israel.

In the Beit Lahiya neighborhood where Ayash died, many said they believe that the telephone bomb was activated by remote control from an Israeli plane flying overhead. But television reporters showed a house across from the apartment that may have been used by agents setting off the blast.

Hamas leaders and some officials in the ruling Palestinian Authority blamed Israel’s Shin Bet security agency for killing the man who had topped Israel’s most-wanted list for three years.

Israeli officials would not confirm the attack, but they were openly delighted by its outcome.

Amnon Abromovitz, an Israeli expert on the Shin Bet, called the assassination “extremely complex, logistically.”

Asked on Israeli television about the seemingly inopportune timing of the killing--it is an embarrassment to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat just before Palestinian elections Jan. 20--Abromovitz explained that the security service usually has standing permission to carry out such operations, and acts when it can, without consulting political leaders on the exact timing.

Israeli officials considered Ayash the operational chief of a suicide bombing campaign that Islamic militants launched in Israel to try to derail the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace accord.

With so many Israeli deaths to his name and a knack for eluding Israeli security forces--Ayash escaped a couple of previous attacks by minutes--he had become a hero to young Palestinians and Islamic extremists.

There was no shortage of young men at Ayash’s funeral who said they were willing to follow his example and die in the struggle to build a Palestinian state in what is now Israel.

“I want to be the next ‘Engineer,’ ” said a 19-year-old who called himself Abu Osama, a pseudonym that identified him as a member of Hamas’ military wing.

“Ask anyone here if he is willing to blow himself up and he will say yes,” 22-year-old Abu Fahdi said. “I am.”

The funeral began with noon prayers at the Palestine Mosque in Gaza City, where mourners waved copies of the Koran and green Islamic flags and fired gunshots into the air as a police car arrived with Ayash’s coffin. Leaflets thrown from the top of the mosque said, “In every Palestinian child there will always be the taste and the determination for revenge.”

“Allahu Akbar [God is great],” shouted the crowd, which some estimates put at 100,000.

Hamas supporters paraded Ayash’s 58-year-old father, Abdel-Latif Ayash, on their shoulders through the mud-soaked streets around the mosque after he arrived there from the West Bank.

“Only good people die as martyrs,” he said with tears streaming down his face.

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Men lined up outside the overflowing mosque and knelt in the street to pray for Ayash before his body was brought out again and carried in a 90-minute march to a cemetery on the outskirts of the city. Ayash’s wife, who had delivered the couple’s second son a couple of days earlier, joined the massive procession.

Respecting a three-day mourning period, most stores were closed along the funeral route and throughout much of Gaza. Palestinian police in riot-control gear were stationed along the way to prevent disturbances, and officers tried to direct traffic, which eventually stopped in gridlock.

Parts of the West Bank were also paralyzed by a general strike.

In Nablus, masked Hamas supporters held a symbolic funeral carrying a casket draped in a Palestinian flag, while in Jericho, protesters burned Israeli flags and called for revenge. In Ramallah and Janin, thousands of demonstrators called for a “quick and painful” revenge.

While most Palestinians seemed angry that Israeli forces had apparently operated inside the Palestinian autonomy area, not all sought revenge. Many seemed more concerned that the assassination could deepen divisions among Palestinians; some banners called for national unity in the face of Israeli aggression.

Other people seemed to fear that they would pay the price for any Hamas revenge against Israel, with closures and other punishments.

Islamic extremists lost support for their terrorist attacks against Israel when, after each one, Israel imposed a closure on autonomous areas, blocking the flow of goods and workers.