Israel Kills New Leader of Hamas

In a fiery strike by helicopter gunships, Israel assassinated Hamas leader Abdulaziz Rantisi on Saturday night, less than a month after his predecessor, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, met the same fate.

The airstrike came four hours after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed an Israeli border police officer at the main crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel. And it followed by only three days a triumphal visit to Washington by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, during which President Bush endorsed the Israeli leader’s plan to withdraw troops and Jewish settlers from Gaza while laying claim to large settlement blocs in the West Bank.

As word of Saturday’s attack spread through Gaza -- first the report that Rantisi had been seriously injured, then confirmation from hospital officials that he was dead -- Palestinians poured by the thousands into the darkened streets, crying out for vengeance.

Frenzied crowds of young men swarmed over the twisted, smoldering wreckage of Rantisi’s car, which was struck just after 8:30 p.m. a block from his family home in the Sheik Radwan district of Gaza City. Two of Rantisi’s bodyguards were killed and about a dozen onlookers were injured in the missile strike, which sent a thunderous boom echoing across this seaside city.

Rantisi, a 56-year-old pediatrician who was one of the founding fathers of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, was named head of the organization after the March 22 assassination -- also in an Israeli airstrike -- of Yassin, the group’s spiritual leader. Rantisi was considered one of the most militant members of Hamas’ leadership circle.

The Hamas leadership in Gaza has now lost its three most senior members in just eight months. Ismail abu Shanab was killed in August. Israel contends that the Palestinian militants it targets are “ticking bombs,” either guilty of or poised to cause the deaths of innocents.

In Washington, the White House repeated the Bush administration’s view that “Israel has the right to defend itself from terrorist attacks” but cautioned, “The United States strongly urges Israel to consider carefully the consequences of its actions, and we again urge all parties to exercise maximum restraint at this time.”

A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the U.S. government was not consulted or informed before the Israeli attack.

The group’s surviving leaders are figures of much less stature, respected in Gaza but relatively little known outside its chaotic milieu of refugee camps and slum cities: physician Mahmoud Zahar, who last year survived an Israeli missile strike on his house, and Ismail Haniyeh, who has served as a spokesman for the group. Early today, Hamas said it had named a secret successor to Rantisi.

Haniyeh, speaking in the blood-splashed corridors of Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital shortly after Rantisi was declared dead, said Israel would pay the price for the killing.

“This sacrifice will not be wasted,” he told a jostling crowd of reporters and onlookers. “It is our fate in Hamas, and as Palestinians, to die as martyrs.... This struggle will not weaken our determination or break our will.”

With a clipped, graying beard and an intense gaze directed from behind wire-rimmed spectacles, Rantisi -- who had spent years in both Israeli and Palestinian prisons -- at times had seemed to be daring the Israelis to come after him. While limiting himself somewhat in his movements around Gaza City, he had presided over several huge public rallies, one in a Gaza City stadium, and preached incendiary sermons to thousands of Hamas faithful.

The Hamas credo calling for Israel’s annihilation has not changed since its founding in 1987, at the beginning of the Palestinians’ first uprising, or intifada. But even Yassin had weighed the idea of a truce if a Palestinian state were created in the West Bank and Gaza -- an option that Rantisi flatly rejected.

The dynamic of the violence in Gaza changed after Sharon announced Israel’s plans to withdraw from the crowded, squalid enclave. Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups immediately claimed victory, saying their attacks were driving Israeli forces out.

Israel, seeking to dispel that impression, hit hard at Hamas and Islamic Jihad with incursions into Gaza cities and refugee camps. The Israeli campaign, which killed dozens of bystanders along with the targeted militants, culminated in the assassination of Yassin.

In the wake of Yassin’s assassination, a feared wave of retaliatory suicide attacks by Hamas and others failed to materialize -- in part because Israel imposed one of its strictest closures in years of the West Bank and Gaza. Israeli security forces said they had foiled dozens of attack plots in the weeks since Yassin’s death, a period that spanned the Jewish holiday of Passover.

The Israeli strike against Rantisi was a swift and decisive response to the first serious attack by Palestinians since the death of Yassin -- a suicide bombing at the Erez crossing between Gaza and Israel.

The attack at the entrance to an industrial zone inside the crossing complex that killed an Israeli border police officer injured three other Israelis, one critically.

Responding to the bombing at Erez, but before the strike against Rantisi, Israeli officials said the suicide attack showed that the Palestinians were not interested in negotiations.

“Unfortunately, this underlines once again that we don’t have, and didn’t have, and probably won’t have a real peace partner on the other side,” said Zalman Shoval, a veteran diplomat who is an advisor to Sharon.

The Rantisi assassination drew expressions of outrage from Palestinian leaders, including those considered moderate. Some blamed not only Israel but also, indirectly, the U.S.

Hanan Ashrawi, a former lawmaker who was involved in past peace efforts, said the United States’ embrace of Sharon’s policies had amounted to implicit approval of lawless behavior on Israel’s part.

“You can see from behavior like this, barbaric behavior, that the Palestinians need the protection of the international community,” Palestinian Authority Cabinet Minister Saeb Erekat said.

Israel’s strategy of assassinating key militants has waxed and waned. Last summer, Israel launched repeated strikes at Hamas’ entire top echelon, but eventually eased off under U.S. pressure.

Sharon’s government has long shrugged off criticism from international human rights groups that its strategy of “targeted killings” amounts to execution without trial.

In keeping with that philosophy, Israeli officials were unapologetic about killing Rantisi. An announcement from the Israeli military branded him “directly responsible for the killing of scores of Israelis in numerous terror attacks.” Sharon said in interviews with the Israeli media this month that anyone known to be behind the killings of Jews was marked for death.

Before being hunted down for the last time, Rantisi and Yassin both had had at least one close call. In June, Rantisi escaped with a leg wound when Israeli helicopters fired missiles at his car on a Gaza City street.

A new wide-ranging confrontation with Hamas could divert attention from Sharon’s political push for domestic approval of the initiative he took to Washington last week. But striking at Hamas, responsible for hundreds of Israeli deaths during 42 months of violence, is never an unpopular step among Israeli voters.

In their White House meeting last week, Sharon told Bush that he intended to remove Israeli troops and Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip but retain several large Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank.

Sharon faces a series of votes on his initiative within his party, his Cabinet and the Knesset, or parliament.

Tensions had been rising in the Palestinian territories even before the strike against Rantisi. In several cities, Palestinians held mass rallies Saturday in tribute to Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, who is confined to his headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah, addressed one such crowd through a broadcast message.

“No one in this world has the right to sign away our land and our rights,” he said. “Our people and their leadership are the only ones who can legitimately speak on behalf of our nation.”

In the Gaza Strip, the popularity of Hamas -- which runs a wide-ranging network of social services -- rivals or exceeds that of Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. Arafat said recently that he would be open to a power-sharing arrangement with Hamas.

The military wing of Hamas, together with the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia loosely affiliated with Arafat’s Fatah faction, claimed joint responsibility for Saturday’s bombing, the fourth suicide attack this year at Erez. Lately, the Palestinian armed factions have increasingly teamed up to carry out attacks.

The two groups identified the bomber as Fahdi Amoodi, from the northern Gaza village of Beit Lahiya.

After the blast tore through the border terminal about 4 p.m., nearly 3,000 workers getting ready to leave their jobs in the industrial zone were forced to wait for hours before being allowed to go back into Gaza.

In a show of force, Israeli helicopters buzzed overhead and a tank rumbled toward the Palestinian side of the crossing. The Israeli army sealed off the area.

Israeli officials have condemned attacks at Erez as harming Palestinians’ ability to make a living. Suicide strikes have led to closures of the industrial zone, long touted as a symbol of coexistence, and triggered sharp restrictions on the number of Palestinian workers allowed to travel to jobs inside Israel proper.

Israeli security sources said the bomber had a permit to work in the industrial zone.

*

Times staff writer King reported from Jerusalem and special correspondent Abu Shammalah from Gaza City.