Israel Kills Palestinian Militant

Israel on Wednesday killed a Palestinian militant it blamed for making powerful bombs that blew up three mammoth battle tanks this year, leaving seven soldiers dead and sending shock waves through the Israeli military establishment.

The strike on 35-year-old Mustafa Sabah, who was affiliated with a relatively small Palestinian militant group, was swift and decisively lethal. Israeli assault helicopters swooped over a Palestinian Authority compound in Gaza City where Sabah worked as a part-time guard and destroyed the concrete-block guardhouse with three missiles fired in rapid succession, onlookers said.

Militant groups quickly vowed vengeance for the killing. “We promise our martyr that we will avenge every drop of his blood, and soon,” said a statement issued by a coalition of groups including Sabah’s Palestinian Popular Resistance Committee.

Since the earliest days of the 26-month-old conflict, Israel has carried out dozens of targeted killings of Palestinian militant leaders it held responsible for orchestrating attacks against Israelis. Israel rarely makes a direct public acknowledgment of having carried out such attacks, but military officials made no attempt to hide their satisfaction over having eliminated Sabah.

He was considered a master bomb maker -- or, in the common jargon of the Israeli army and Palestinian militant groups, a highly competent “engineer.” Soon after the strike, the military spokesman’s office released a list of attacks for which Sabah was blamed -- chief among them three roadside bombings that had blown up three Merkava tanks this year.

Three Israeli soldiers were killed when a 170-pound bomb exploded underneath a Merkava on Feb. 14; another three soldiers of the tank crew died and two were injured by a similar device planted on a nearby Gaza road a month later, on March 14. Another Israeli soldier was killed and three were injured in a third Merkava blast Sept. 5, not far from the same spot.

Israeli military sources also said Sabah had outfitted and dispatched at least one would-be suicide bomber, whose target was an Israeli settlement in the Gaza Strip. The behemoth Merkava battle tanks, designed to be highly resistant even to extremely powerful explosives planted directly in their path, hold a place of pride in Israel’s military arsenal.

During Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, there was consternation in Israeli military circles when the guerrilla group Hezbollah managed to craft roadside bombs capable of damaging or destroying Merkavas. The tanks were modified and their armor strengthened in response to that campaign.

The subsequent success of the attacks attributed to Sabah, all of them on Gaza roads used almost exclusively by Israeli armored vehicles, was another shock to Israel, because Palestinian militant groups aren’t viewed as being as technically proficient as Hezbollah.

Israel sent in at least three attack helicopters to participate in the daylight raid, witnesses said. Such attacks had become relatively rare in Gaza after a massive bomb dropped on a Hamas leader’s apartment building this year killed more than a dozen other people, including women and children.

Sabah’s whereabouts would probably have been pinpointed by the large network of informers and collaborators Israel has cultivated in the West Bank and Gaza, or through Israeli electronic surveillance of militants’ conversations by radio and mobile telephone.

Elsewhere, two wanted Palestinian men, both of them from the militant group Islamic Jihad, died in an early morning gun battle after Israeli soldiers tracked them to a cave hide-out near the West Bank town of Hebron. The army said the men opened fire at soldiers who tried to arrest them. Afterward, the army blew up the cave to prevent it from being used for refuge again.