Israel Tries to Kill Top Militant

GAZA CITY -- Striking at a delicate moment in the just- revived Middle East peace process, Israeli attack helicopters Tuesday rained missiles on a vehicle carrying a senior Hamas leader, wounding him, killing a bodyguard and a bystander, and injuring dozens of other Palestinian passersby.

The government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon defended the attempt to kill Abdulaziz Rantisi, who has been the militant Islamic group’s most visible and vocal critic of the U.S.-backed peace initiative known as the road map. Israel said Rantisi was deeply involved in the planning of many attacks against Israelis; Hamas insists his role has been solely a political one.

The Israeli strike, which came six days after a summit attended by President Bush and the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, drew a swift U.S. rebuke. Bush said he was “deeply troubled” by the Israeli action and added that he believed it “does not contribute to the security of Israel.”

The attack cast a chill on a fledgling peace process that has been tested since practically the last handshake at the summit. Both Sharon and Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas face fiery domestic opposition to elements of the plan, which envisions the creation of a Palestinian state with permanent borders by 2005.

Hamas vowed vengeance, suggesting it would target Israeli political figures in retaliation. “An eye for an eye,” Hamas spokesman Mahmoud Zahar said shortly after the attack. “And a politician for a politician.”

Abbas -- who has been engaged in a knife’s-edge balancing act as he seeks to win a cease-fire pledge from the militant groups while Israel presses him for a full- fledged crackdown against them -- could hardly conceal his dismay at news of the raid.

Abbas, 56, learned of the Israeli attack while attending a conference on the Palestinian economy at a hotel in the West Bank town of Ramallah. Besieged by journalists for comment, he turned on his heel and walked away without a word, his face set and grim.

“We consider this a criminal act and a terrorist operation, with all that this word means, because it was aimed at innocent civilians,” he said later on Palestinian television.

Hours after the Israeli strike, there was more bloodshed in Gaza. Palestinian militants fired six homemade rockets, which landed harmlessly, toward the Israeli town of Sderot. At about the same time, Israeli tanks and helicopters fired toward a Palestinian neighborhood. Palestinian witnesses said three people -- two men and a teenage girl -- were killed, and about two dozen others wounded.

The strike against Rantisi put the Palestinian prime minister in an extremely difficult political position. He has been trying to defend himself against assertions by Hamas and other militant factions that he was too conciliatory at the summit. But he appears to have limited success with the Palestinian public.

Aides to the Palestinian prime minister called the Israeli strike a deliberate bid by Sharon to scuttle the peace process.

“This attack is aimed at destroying efforts by the Palestinian leadership to reach a truce and cease-fire,” Cabinet Minister Yasser Abed-Rabbo said. He called on the Bush administration to “immediately intervene to put an end to this criminal plot by Sharon and his government.”

Sharon, in an evening speech in the coastal city of Netanya, did not specifically mention the strike against Rantisi but struck a defiant note in the face of the U.S. criticism.

“We will fight the leaders of terror organizations who instigate, finance and dispatch terrorists setting out to murder Jews,” he said.

Rantisi was targeted two days after he went before the cameras to praise an ambush by Palestinian gunmen in the Gaza Strip that left four Israeli soldiers dead. He called the joint attack proof that Palestinian armed factions were united in their opposition to the peace plan and pledged that more attacks would follow.

For Israel, it seemed, Rantisi’s justification and apparent intimate knowledge of the attack’s planning were the last straw.

“The reason and the timing are very simple,” said an Israeli security official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “He said in his own words that Hamas will attack Israelis wherever they are.... Basically we had no other option than to act against Hamas.”

In the course of the intifada, Israel has killed, or tried to kill, dozens of militant leaders. But the targeting of Palestinian political figures is a relative rarity, with Israel saying it only goes after those with “blood on their hands.”

Palestinian extremists have succeeded in killing one high-ranking Israeli politician. In October 2001, Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi was gunned down in an attack that was said to be in retaliation for Israel’s assassination of a senior Palestinian political leader.

Reuven Paz, an analyst who formerly worked in Israeli domestic intelligence, said an attack like the one against Rantisi would have to have been personally approved by Sharon.

He said, however, that the decision to try to kill Rantisi would have been made days or weeks earlier, with military intelligence watching around the clock for the right moment to strike.

“So the prime minister was handed this hot potato -- the opportunity -- and I’m not quite sure that he would have wanted to make the decision at this specific time,” said Paz, who lectures at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya.

Other commentators, however, suggested that Sharon may have been seeking to boost his standing among right-wing Israelis, particularly angry and disaffected Jewish settlers.

Israeli troops Monday began dismantling some unoccupied offshoots of existing Jewish settlements as part of Israel’s commitments under the road map. But soldiers have not yet moved on any inhabited outposts.

Witnesses said the Gaza raid began just after 11 a.m., when at least two AH-64 Apache attack helicopters suddenly roared overhead as Rantisi’s four-wheel-drive vehicle was making its way west on Shifa Street, a main artery through Gaza City.

He was headed toward the Shati refugee camp, a desperately poor beachfront shantytown that has long been a Hamas stronghold.

As the vehicle approached the intersection of Izzidin al-Qassam Street -- named for an Arab warrior, after whom Hamas’ military wing calls itself -- the first missile struck its engine compartment, the force of the explosion shattering windows in a nearby drapery store.

The vehicle rolled forward toward the intersection where Rantisi, his son and a driver leaped out before the next five missiles hit the car, the street and a weedy vacant lot, witnesses said.

“All I could see was smoke and fire,” said Ibrahim Ahmed, who was standing in front of a nearby shop when the blast hit. “The jeep was burning like wood. When the doctor jumped from it, we ran toward him, and we all took cover.”

Rantisi underwent surgery for shrapnel wounds in his left leg, said Dr. Moawiya Hassanen, the director of emergency medicine at Shifa Hospital, the city’s largest.

In addition to the bodyguard and a 50-year-old woman who were killed, 35 people were injured, seven of them seriously, he said.

As news always does in Gaza, word of the attack spread almost instantaneously. A crowd of several hundred people gathered outside the hospital, some of them dropping to the ground to pray for Rantisi’s safety.

“We want to liberate our land -- we sacrifice our blood for it!” they chanted.

Soon after regaining consciousness, Rantisi gave a furious interview to the Arabic- language satellite channel Al Jazeera.

“The gun will reach every inch of the Palestinian land, and this pig Sharon will never have peace,” he said.

Later, in a Times interview from his hospital bed, he was pale, appeared weak and spoke in slow, tired tones.

Asked about Abbas’ characterization of the raid as a terror attack, he replied: “That is nice to say, but if that was the case, will he continue to talk with the terrorists?”While Abbas has called for an end to the Palestinians’ 32-month-old armed uprising against Israel, he has also made plain his intense wish to avoid internecine strife with armed groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

“No one will be allowed to drag us into a civil war,” Abbas said last week after Rantisi poured disdain on his summit speech and said Hamas would not negotiate with him.

In Gaza, Rantisi is a popular and respected figure, second in stature only to Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin. Palestinians who witnessed the attack, even those who said they did not consider themselves active supporters of Hamas, spoke of their sense of rage and helplessness.

“My friend ran in here burned and bleeding, my neighbor was hit in the head by shrapnel, and another neighbor is still in the hospital,” said shopkeeper Odeh Addas, whose store is about 25 yards from where the missiles hit. “Why? What for? What did they do to deserve this?”

Special correspondent Fayed abu Shammalah in Gaza City contributed to this report.