Has Israel blown up more than a Hamas leader, his family and neighbours?
AT FIRST the Israeli government said it was self-defence against terrorism; it later said that a mistake might have been made. The Palestinians said it was a massacre. Outsiders deplored it, with even the United States saying that “this heavy-handed action does not contribute to peace”. Whatever it was, Israel's assassination of Hamas's military leader, Salah Shehada, will almost certainly lead to more killing in a land already soaked in blood.
In the night of July 22nd-23rd, an Israeli F-16 dropped a one-tonne bomb on Mr Shehada's apartment in Gaza city. The army said it thought that the place was empty, save for the Hamas leader and his bodyguard. But Palestinians and others point out that the building sat in the residential heart of Gaza's most densely peopled town. Aside from Mr Shehada and his guard, 13 Palestinians were killed and 145 wounded. The dead included nine children, one aged two months.
Mr Shehada has long topped Israel's list of Palestinian quarries, wanted for scores of attacks on soldiers and settlers in Gaza, and also, says the army, for planning suicide bombings inside Israel. Ariel Sharon called his death “one of our greatest successes”. He added that “it is always regrettable if civilians are hit.”
Palestinians detect a darker purpose behind the assassination. Last week, Hamas gunmen blew up a bus near a West Bank settlement and machinegunned its civilian passengers. But a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv on July 17th was the first attack inside Israel itself for a month. And, since then, there have been Palestinian stirrings that allowed for hope that the violence would at least be diminished.
On July 20th, Abdul Razek Yahyia, the Palestinians' interior minister, announced a new security plan devised by the Palestinian Authority (PA). The plan, which was well received by Shimon Peres, Israel's foreign minister, is aimed at reducing the “atmosphere for violence” in the Palestinian areas. It requires the gradual withdrawal of the Israeli army from recently re-occupied Palestinian cities, and the gradual resumption of the PA's policing duties, including the confiscation of illegal arms and the arrest of lawbreakers.
Other moves, too, were in the air. At the time of Mr Shehada's killing, say Palestinian sources, plans (encouraged by diplomats from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the EU) for a new Palestinian “ceasefire” were on the verge of being agreed. The initial move would be that militias linked to Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement—such as the al-Aqsa Brigades—declared a moratorium on suicide bombings inside Israel as a first step to a cessation of hostilities.
Perhaps more important, something was in the air inside Hamas itself. On July 22nd, the Islamic faction's spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, said that his men would stop killing Israeli civilians if the army withdrew from Palestinian cities, lifted the sieges on Palestinian areas, freed recently detained prisoners and ended the assassinations of Palestinian leaders. The sheikh has also been floating the idea of some sort of unwritten pact with Israel that would confine violence to military targets in the occupied territories. This would be akin to the “understandings” (to avoid attacks on civilians) between the Israeli army and Hizbullah during the last years of Israel's occupation of south Lebanon.
While still remote from being acceptable to Israel, all this showed that some change was being contemplated. No longer. In the aftermath of the bombing, Hamas's military arm promised not to rest “until the Zionists see human remains in every restaurant, bus, bus stop and street” (ie, more of the same, many Israelis would say). The al-Aqsa Brigades said that “martyrdom operations” would be continued.
Is this what Israel's prime minister wants: the continuation of a conflict that bars peace talks? Many Palestinians argue that there have been several occasions when Mr Sharon has destroyed periods of relative quiet by ordering the assassination of Palestinian leaders, thus inspiring their militias to revenge. They point to the killing of Abu Ali Mustafa, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in August 2001, and of Raed Karmi, leader of the al-Aqsa Brigades, in January 2002. Both these assassinations were preceded by relative calm, and followed by blood-letting. The horror of the Palestinians' revenge, or so the conspiracy theorists argue, drums up an Israeli “consensus of fear” behind Mr Sharon's policy on not letting go the West Bank.
Most observers have doubted that there can be much truth in such theories. But after yet another untimely killing, the Palestinians' argument is winning new recruits, and not only in Palestine.
