Israel Kills Key Member of Hamas; Revenge Vowed

A day after a visit by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell aimed at reviving a U.S.-backed peace plan, Israeli troops Saturday killed a senior Hamas activist in the West Bank city of Hebron. Hamas immediately vowed that it would seek revenge, and the Palestinians called the killing an assassination that harmed prospects for a peace accord.

The slain man, Abdullah Kawasme, was at the top of Israel’s most-wanted list in the West Bank. Described by Israel as the chief of Hamas’ military wing in Hebron, he had headed a cell believed responsible for several major suicide attacks. Israel said he had personally acted as the “handler” of several bombers, including the young Palestinian from Hebron who blew up a bus in the center of Jerusalem on June 11. Seventeen Israelis died in that attack.

The death of Kawasme, together with Hamas’ pledge of reprisal and the angry response by the Palestinian Authority, cast a new shadow on prospects for the peace “road map,” unfurled with fanfare at a June 4 summit in Jordan attended by President Bush, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas.

It also came a day after optimistic reports that Powell was working with Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate security concerns in the Gaza Strip, Hamas’ stronghold.

Israelis and Palestinians had very different interpretations of events in Hebron, which went to the crux of their dispute over so-called targeted killings. Throughout the Palestinians’ 33-month-old intifada, or uprising, such strikes against militant leaders have drawn international condemnation.

Israel said Saturday’s action was not an assassination but an attempt to arrest a wanted man they had been tracking actively for weeks. Security sources said Kawasme was armed with a pistol and an M-16 assault rifle, but they could not immediately say whether he had drawn his weapons.

“Arrest would have been the preferable option,” a security source said.

However, Palestinian witnesses said at least two carloads of Israeli special forces surrounded Kawasme near a mosque in the center of Hebron about 9:30 p.m. and immediately opened fire. Palestinian officials characterized it as a deliberate killing.

“This is another proof that the Israelis are ... continuing the assassinations,” Palestinian Authority Cabinet Minister Yasser Abed-Rabbo told the Reuters news agency.

“These operations are meant to obstruct any success of the dialogue to reach a truce” with armed Palestinian factions, he said.

Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, called the killing of Kawasme evidence that “Israel is not interested in calm or quiet. The Zionist enemy will pay the consequences of such a vicious crime.”

Israeli troops immediately cordoned off the area after the shooting, and a curfew imposed in the city center was still in effect this morning.

The killing shattered what had been an eight-day lull in an Israeli campaign against leaders and senior field operatives of Hamas, a group responsible for hundreds of Israeli deaths. In the week following the peace summit in Aqaba, Israel killed six Hamas activists in missile strikes in the Gaza Strip and wounded a senior leader, Abdulaziz Rantisi.

Sharon has defended the timing of those killings, saying all the men targeted, including Rantisi, posed a threat serious enough to justify action. Despite U.S. appeals that Israel confine such killings to so-called ticking bombs -- those who are about to carry out attacks -- Israel has consistently indicated that it alone would determine whether someone was dangerous enough to warrant being targeted.

Israel’s position has been that neutralizing Hamas’ ability to carry out attacks advances, rather than harms, the peace process.

The killing of Kawasme came just hours after Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom had insisted that Israel would continue to act strongly against Hamas unless Abbas took swift steps to rein in militant groups.

“If we don’t insist on this now, we won’t be able to move ahead with the process,” Shalom told Israel Radio. Up until now, he said, Israel had used “kid gloves” with Hamas.

For his part, Abbas has been conducting negotiations over the last two weeks with Hamas and other armed Palestinian factions to try to secure a cease-fire.

Palestinian Authority security chief Mohammed Dahlan said after the authority’s Cabinet meeting on Saturday in Gaza -- but before the killing of Kawasme -- that Hamas was expected to give its answer to the latest overtures soon. He said the militant groups “understand how dangerous the situation is.”

The latest Israeli strike against Hamas came on the eve of a planned meeting in Jordan of the peace initiative’s sponsors -- the United Nations, the European Union, Russia and the United States -- to talk about ways of keeping the plan alive.

Powell’s visit had been aimed at giving impetus to efforts by Israelis and the Palestinians to work out an agreement under which Israel would withdraw from the entire Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Bethlehem, handing over security control of those areas to Palestinian forces.

But Israeli officials say those plans hinged on the Palestinian Authority being able to prevent Hamas and other militant groups from using, as staging grounds for attacks, the areas vacated by Israel.

The Palestinians object to Israel keeping control of the main north-south road in Gaza, saying that the continuing division of the strip into small sectors will do little to restore Palestinians’ freedom of movement and ability to travel to jobs.

“We on the Palestinian side are waiting for a serious and real proposal for the Israeli withdrawal, not an insubstantial proposal, something shaped from the outside,” Dahlan said after the Cabinet meeting.

Even before the bus bombing in Jerusalem, Kawasme had been a hunted man.

In recent months, his Hebron cell had been viewed by Israelis as a particularly dangerous one, because it was relatively easy for the cell members to get out of the West Bank and make their way to Israeli cities to carry out attacks. The Hamas cell was also blamed for a bus bombing in the northern port city of Haifa in March that killed 15 people and for a suicide bombing in Jerusalem in May that killed seven people.

After initially questioning Sharon’s judgment in launching a campaign against Hamas on the heels of the Aqaba summit, the Bush administration closed ranks with Israel in describing Hamas as a lethal threat.

During his visit to Jerusalem on Friday, Powell described Hamas as “an enemy of peace.” Rantisi, in turn, called Powell a “little slave” of Israel and the United States.

Bush administration officials said national security advisor Condoleezza Rice may be dispatched to the region in the coming week to try to salvage the peace plan, which began unraveling within days of the summit at which it was endorsed by Sharon and Abbas.

More than 60 people on both sides of the conflict have died in ambushes, shootings, bombings and missile strikes since then, including an American citizen, Tzvi Goldstein, who was killed in a shooting that occurred while Sharon was meeting with Powell on Friday. Goldstein and his family were driving from the West Bank settlement where he lived to Jerusalem for a wedding reception for his son.

Goldstein’s elderly parents, who were from Long Island, were seriously wounded.

Hamas has claimed responsibility.