Anger Fills Hamas Funeral

Shouts of “Revenge! Revenge!” rose into the steamy air as tens of thousands of Palestinians, many waving the green flag of Hamas, marched Friday in a tumultuous funeral procession for the radical Islamic group’s most senior leader to be killed by Israel during nearly three years of violence.

Even as Hamas swore to target every Israeli man, woman and child to avenge the death of one of its founding members, Ismail abu Shanab, Israel signaled that it stood ready to carry out assassinations of other top leaders of armed Palestinian groups -- a policy it had abandoned during nearly two months of relative calm.

Israel also pressed ahead with a campaign to hunt down other wanted men -- and take them dead or alive. In the West Bank city of Nablus, two men identified by Israeli security sources as members of a terrorist cell were killed when soldiers opened fire on their hide-out on a hospital rooftop. No attempt was made to arrest them, the sources said.

Israel’s targeting of Abu Shanab -- who died Thursday when the car he was riding in was obliterated by helicopter-fired missiles on a Gaza street -- came in the wake of a Jerusalem suicide bombing two days earlier that killed 20 people, six of them children.

Amid every indication that the violence was likely to intensify, few ordinary people on either side seemed to believe that an American-backed peace plan could be salvaged.

Israelis ushered in a solemn Sabbath, the first since the bombing, still reeling from the sights of the past days: tiny coffins being lowered into stony ground, front-page newspaper photographs of maimed children reunited with wounded parents, a forlorn, makeshift shrine in a busy traffic circle where body bags had lain.

“Now we have to prepare for the possibility that we will return once again to a whirlpool of blood, days of tension and battle ... that might deteriorate into all-out warfare,” commentator Alex Fishman wrote in Friday’s editions of the Yediot Aharonot newspaper.

More than half the Israelis surveyed by the Dahaf agency for a poll published Friday in Yediot Aharonot said they expected terrorist attacks to increase in the next three months. Fewer than 40% said Israel should continue with measures it promised as part of the peace initiative known as the “road map.”

In Gaza, the enormous turnout for the funeral of Abu Shanab -- the largest such gathering since the outbreak of the intifada, or uprising, in September 2000 -- boded ill for the already faltering government of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, who is also known as Abu Mazen.

The killing came as Abbas and his security chief, Mohammed Dahlan, were trying to secure permission from Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to round up Palestinian militants, seize weapons and deprive the radical groups of their funding sources.

In his first comments on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the bus bombing in Jerusalem, President Bush urged the Palestinians to crack down on suicide bombers.

“If people want there to be peace in the Middle East, if the Palestinians want to see their own state, they’ve got to dismantle the terrorist networks,” Bush told reporters Friday as he landed in Seattle for a campaign fund-raiser.

“Those people who conduct suicide bombings are not interested in the vision that I have outlined, and that is a Palestinian state living side by side with Israel in peace,” Bush said.

To increase pressure on Hamas, Bush also ordered a freeze on the assets of six Hamas leaders and five European charities that he said provide financial support for the group. The United States has already frozen Hamas’ assets. U.S. officials suspect that the groups and individuals identified Friday have most of their money in Europe, and they hope the action will persuade European governments to impose a similar freeze.

The action also prohibits financial transactions between Americans and these individuals and groups.

In Gaza City on Friday, as volatile crowds surged through the rundown streets, there were outbursts of fury not only at Israel, but also at Abbas for his perceived willingness to carry out a crackdown. From small knots of men, shouts of “Abu Mazen is a collaborator!” were heard.

Hamas, which is dedicated to Israel’s destruction, already enjoys far greater public support in Gaza than the Palestinian Authority. The death of 53-year-old Abu Shanab, a highly regarded figure here, appeared to further bolster the militant group.

The ranks of mourners included not only the usual complement of masked men firing AK-47s into the air but also many ordinary Gazans. Old men hobbled along, leaning heavily on canes, and little boys wore Hamas flags, which trailed from their necks like superheroes’ capes.

“I just came to show my respect,” said Yasser Faqi, 25, who held his wide-eyed 5-year-old son Khalil firmly by the hand in the crush. “What Israel did here was a crime.”

All over Gaza City, walls that had been wiped clean of graffiti last month in a nod to the peace plan’s anti-incitement provisions were splashed overnight with fiery Hamas slogans. “We are ready to strike at the heart of Israel,” one proclaimed in oversize letters.

In a show of defiance, all of Hamas’ most prominent figures attended the funeral. Among them were the group’s ailing spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who was cheered by the crowd when he traveled part of the procession route pushed in his wheelchair; Abdulaziz Rantisi, who narrowly escaped death in a missile attack on his car in June; and Mahmoud Zahar, a physician who runs a street clinic in a slum neighborhood of Gaza City.

Rantisi, who preached a bitingly angry sermon at the mosque where Abu Shanab’s body was taken for prayers, told mourners that Hamas had a secret shadow leadership that stood ready to take over if the existing top echelon is killed.

“Our blood won’t come without a price,” Zahar added. “And that price is every Jewish house, every piece of land, every person who is an occupier in Palestine” -- meaning, he said, all of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel.

Senior Israeli defense officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Friday that there were plans in place to kill leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other militant groups if another attack against Israelis occurs or if Abbas and Dahlan do not start arresting Hamas figures.

Abbas’ government, however, had already declared that the planned crackdown on the militant groups was frozen in the wake of Abu Shanab’s assassination.

A professor of civil engineering, Abu Shanab had been Hamas’ chief negotiator in talks with the Palestinian Authority that led to the June 29 declaration of a unilateral truce by the militant groups.

The weeks of the truce, or hudna, were marked by sporadic, low-level attacks, but there was a considerable drop in the number of deaths, particularly on the Israeli side.

Although Israelis considered Tuesday’s bus bombing, carried out by a Hamas cell from the West Bank city of Hebron, to have in effect ended the cease-fire, the militant groups formally declared it terminated with the death of Abu Shanab.

After the attempt on Rantisi’s life this summer, Israel declared that it recognized no difference between self-described political leaders like him and Abu Shanab and the group’s military wing, which has carried out attacks that have killed hundreds of Israelis. Israeli officials indicated that if there is a return to the strategy of assassination, no such distinction would be observed.

In the hours after Abu Shanab’s death, Palestinian militants fired 28 mortar rounds and six homemade Kassam rockets at Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip and in the direction of Israeli communities outside it, the Israeli army said. None caused casualties or damage.

In what Israel described as a response to the rocket fire, troops reimposed roadblocks at two points on Gaza’s main north-south highway, in effect cutting the strip into three parts.

The reopening of the road earlier this summer, after it had been closed for nearly two years, was one of the first steps taken by Israel to implement a pledge to gradually return parts of the West Bank and Gaza to Palestinian control.

The removal of roadblocks from the thoroughfare was described by Israel at the time as a goodwill gesture meant to ease the daily lives of Palestinians, many of whom had been unable to travel to work or school or make family visits.

In Washington, the Treasury Department said the Hamas members whose assets will be frozen are Yassin; Rantisi; Usama Hamdan, a senior Hamas leader in Lebanon; Imad Khalil Alami, a member of Hamas’ political bureau in Syria; Musa abu Marzouk, deputy chief of the political bureau in Syria; and Khalid Mishaal, head of the Hamas political bureau and executive committee in Syria.

The charities whose assets were frozen are the Committee for Charity and Aid for the Palestinians, a support group based in France; the Assn. for Palestinian Aid, in Switzerland; the Palestinian Relief and Development Fund, or Interpal, headquartered in Britain; the Palestinian Assn. in Austria; and the Sanabil Assn. for Relief and Development, which is based in Lebanon.

The Treasury action makes it easier for U.S. officials to press the Palestinian Authority, as they have been, to clamp down on the assets of Hamas leaders and supporters, said Edward S. Walker Jr., a retired U.S. diplomat who is president of the Middle East Institute in Washington.

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Times staff writers Maura Reynolds in Burbank, Wash., and Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this report.