Israel Kills Militant in Anti-Hamas Push

Pressing ahead with what is fast becoming an all-out campaign against Hamas, Israeli helicopters Thursday again fired missiles at a vehicle carrying a key operative of the militant Palestinian group. The targeted man was killed, along with his wife and infant daughter and four Palestinian bystanders.

The Israeli missile attack in the Gaza Strip occurred one day after a Hamas suicide bomber disguised as an ultra-Orthodox Jew killed 17 Israelis on a Jerusalem bus.

At funeral after funeral Thursday, there were wrenching scenes of grief as bombing victims were laid to rest, with relatives sobbing at gravesides and delivering tear-choked eulogies.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, weathering political fallout from the string of targeted attacks against Palestinian militants, insisted that he had no intention of backing down from the confrontation with Hamas.

Hamas issued a fiery statement Thursday, amid a deepening sense of gloom and foreboding over the fate of the U.S.-backed peace process.

“The Jerusalem attack is the beginning of a new series ... in which we will target every Zionist occupying our land,” the military wing of Hamas, Izzidin al-Qassam, said in a statement faxed to Western news organizations. “We call on foreigners to leave the Zionist entity immediately to save their lives.”

Israeli authorities reported dozens of “hot” warnings of imminent terrorist attacks, and stepped-up vigilance against suicide bombers was said to be taxing the country’s security services to their limits.

At an emergency Cabinet meeting, Sharon said Israel had no choice but to stage the attacks against the Hamas operatives because Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas had shown himself to be incapable of cracking down hard on Palestinian militant groups.

Abbas is “a chick without feathers,” Sharon was quoted by Israeli media as mockingly telling his ministers. “We have to help him fight terror until his feathers grow in.”

That drew an angry retort from Nabil Amr, the Palestinian Authority’s information minister.

“He wants to throw accusations and ridicule here and there, and blame others for his own failures,” Amr said. “He’s the one who promised security to his people, but after two years he hasn’t been able to provide it, because of his own stupid policies.”

In Washington, Bush administration officials blamed Hamas for the escalation of violence.

“The issue is not Israel. The issue is not the Palestinian Authority,” White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said. “The issue are these relatively small but deadly groups of terrorists who are trying to stop Israel and the Palestinian Authority from coming together at a time when they are, indeed, coming together.

“That’s why they strike now,” Fleischer continued. “They strike now because they see peace on the horizon, and Hamas is an enemy to peace.”

On Tuesday, President Bush sharply criticized Israel for attacking a major Hamas leader.

On Thursday, after blaming Hamas for the upsurge in violence, Fleischer declined to repeat that criticism of Israel: “I leave it at just where I put it this morning.”

But from Israeli politicians there was mounting criticism of the attempted assassination of senior Hamas leader Abdulaziz Rantisi, who escaped with leg wounds when Israeli helicopters destroyed his SUV with missiles Tuesday, killing his bodyguard and a female bystander and injuring dozens.

Four other Hamas militants were killed in helicopter strikes Wednesday night that also left six Palestinian civilians dead.

Justice Minister Tommy Lapid demanded to know why Sharon hadn’t brought the plan to strike at Rantisi before his full Cabinet for approval and instead consulted only a small inner circle of military and security officials. Opposition lawmaker Dalia Itzik said the danger posed by Rantisi did not justify a strike at a time when it could jeopardize the fledgling peace process.

“As God is my witness, I simply cannot understand the logic of the timing, even if he did deserve this,” she said. “Why now?”

Israel’s security establishment has been staunch in its insistence that Rantisi, who had always disavowed direct knowledge of the actions of the Hamas military wing, was in fact deeply involved in planning and ordering attacks against Israelis.

“Sharon can be pragmatic on ideology, but he simply won’t be pragmatic on security,” said Shmuel Sandler, an analyst at Bar-Ilan University. “Had a tougher Palestinian leader been on the scene, I think they would be more ready to trust him to do the job, but Mr. Abbas doesn’t have the tools to implement a cease-fire with the militant groups.”

In Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell called Abbas and Sharon as well as the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Israel to urge a greater effort to end the violence.

Powell said his message was that all parties “have to keep moving forward, that it would be a disaster if we lost this opportunity.”

In the Gaza Strip, the mood in the streets was one of fury after the latest Israeli strike, this one targeting wanted Hamas leader Yasser Taha.

Helicopter-fired missiles incinerated his car Thursday as he drove through the Sheik Radwan neighborhood, a Hamas stronghold. More missiles then injured would-be rescuers who rushed to the burning vehicle.

“When I got to the car, I found the body of a man, scorched black like coal, and an infant girl cut to pieces,” said Yasser Awad, who was slightly hurt.

“I found a hand with gold rings on the fingers,” he said. “I think it belonged to a woman, his wife.” Onlookers angrily waved a baby bottle and a small, charred shoe they had pulled from the smoldering wreckage.

Israel said its intelligence had not indicated that Taha’s family was in the car with him.

Israel described Taha as a senior Hamas leader who had been involved in many attacks against Israelis, including one in which five yeshiva, or Jewish university, students were killed last year at a Gaza settlement.

Late Thursday, an Israeli man, a coal merchant who had traveled to a Palestinian village, was killed in an ambush, Israeli authorities reported.

As Israel buried victims of the bus bombing, poignant stories emerged of the lives of some of those caught in the blast. Among the dead were a young engaged couple, 21-year-old student Bat-el Ohana and Yaniv Abayed, 22, a security guard. Their families remembered the challenges the pair had overcome -- he having been orphaned as a child, she being nearly blind.

“You were once the prettiest little girl in kindergarten.... We wanted to see you marry, but you were taken away,” Miri Zahuv, Ohana’s aunt, said at her graveside. “You wanted to marry Yaniv, and you went away together, together in life and death.

“May you be the last victims of this evil.”

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Times staff writers Maura Reynolds and Robin Wright in Washington and special correspondent Fayed abu Shammalah in Gaza City contributed to this report.