MIDDLE EAST: Killing Of Hamas Radical Undermines Peace Process

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IPS Correspondents

JERUSALEM, Jan 8 1996 (IPS) - Israel’s assassination of Palestinian radical Yehiya Ayyash has undermined the credibility of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, damaged the prospects for upcoming elections and threatened a restart to bomb attacks against Israeli targets.

Across the Middle East the attack is also undermining efforts by pro-peace leaders to persuade their populations to accept peace with Israel. In Jordan supporters of Ayyash’s Islamic Resistance group (Hamas) flocked to the home of an Amman-based senior member as Arab papers across the region condemned the attack.

Arafat was politically embarrassed by the ease in which Israeli secret service forces, apparently aided by a collaborator, got to the bombmaker, in hiding in supposedly Palestinian ruled Gaza.

The attack also pointed up their disregard for Arafat’s painstaking efforts to persuade Hamas to cease their armed resistance and join the conventional political process.

In a communique issued Monday, Hamas spokesman Ibrahim Ghoshe called on the Palestinian Authority to reveal “all circumstances surrounding this odious crime”. He said that while Israel was behind the killing, Arafat’s authority also bore responsibility, as the attack “took place on territory under their control.”

Though Israel has refused to confirm or deny its involvement, it has delighted in the success of Friday’s daring operation. “The fact that he was killed is the best present that all of us could have received” Gideon Ezra, former deputy head of Shin Bet, the domestic Israeli security agency, told western media.

He cited low morale in the secret service since the murder of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. “I would like to say in these bad times for our security people — if they are connected to this killing — that we should give them all our blessings.”

Israeli Premier Shimon Peres Monday refused to accept Israel’s part in the killing. But he added: “If someone thinks he can kill Israelis and Israel will remain indifferent that’s a slight exaggeration.” A poll for the Israeli Yediot Aharonot daily said 87 percent of Israelis welcomed Ayyash’s killing.

Arafat called the assassination a violation of the Israeli-PLO Oslo peace pacts. “We ask them (the Israelis) to stop tampering in Palestinian territory,” Arafat said. Under Oslo, Gaza and other ‘self-rule’ ares are controlled by Palestinian authorities, and Israeli security is not supposed to operate there.

The attack also undermines efforts in Arab states to sell the peace process to Oslo’s many critics, particularly among the Islamic parties. In Amman, members of the Islamic Action Front addressed crowd who gathered at the home of Mohammed Nazal, a member of the Hamas political bureau to pay their respects.

Hamas recently concluded an agreement with Arafat in which the militant Islamic group agreed to halt action against Israel in Palestinian-controlled areas in the West Bank and Gaza if Arafat released Hamas prisoners in Gaza jails.

The attack is expected to end all hopes of Hamas lifting their demand for a boycott of upcoming elections for an 88-member governing council and executive leader on Jan. 20. It has sapped Palestinian confidence that Israel would like to see the Jan. 20 elections — and the peace agreement in general — succeed.

“This means one thing to me,” said a Palestinian money changer who declined to give his name. “Israel does not want peace.” Some 5,000 Palestinians marched through a Palestinian-controlled village near Hebron to protest the killing on Monday.

Peres denied that Israel was creating tension between Hamas and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). “We did everything to make things as comfortable as possible for the PNA, we have respected every word of the agreement,” he said.

“The killing of Yehiya Ayyash has a very bad symbolic action about our life under the security control of the Palestinian autonomy,” said Hamas spokesman Mahmoud Zahar, “and we have to reevaluate our security roles here according to what happened.

“You know the attitude of Hamas is not to lose blood without revenge,” he added. Monday was the last day of an official three- day mourning period for Ayyash.

“We are on alert for attacks,” said Israeli army spokesman Shlomo Dror. “We guess there will be people who will want to carry out attacks. There always were but now they have a better reason to do so.”

A top member of the Izzadin al-Qassam, the armed wing of Hamas, Ayyash, 30, a former chemistry student, had been on Israel’s most wanted list since a Palestinian suicide bomber killed eight Israelis in April 1993.

He was suspected of masterminding a series of deadly bus bombings that have killed scores of Israelis since the 1993 Oslo peace agreement signed between Israel and the PLO, including a bus bombing in October 1994 that killed 22 people in Tel Aviv’s fashionable Dizengoff Street.

He was killed by a two ounce explosive charge apparently planted by Israeli forces in a mobile phone, secured for the purpose by Kamal Hamad, an uncle of Ayyash’s former university roommate Usama Hamad. Ayyash had been in hiding at Usama Hamad’s home for several weeks.

Ayyash, nicknamed ‘the engineer’ for his bombmaking skills had checked the mobile phone for booby traps before, but Kamal Hamad had borrowed the phone from his nephew shortly before. Ayyash had made careful time and date arrangements to speak with his father, who lives in the West Bank, by phone.

But at the scheduled time for the call, Kamal Hamad, not his father, phoned on an ordinary line and asked Ussam Hamad to switch on the mobile. Calls on the normal phone line were then disrupted, forcing Ayyash’s father — against the instructions of his son — to call him on the mobile. When he spoke into the mobile phone, it exploded.

Family sources believe that Kamal Hamad is now in the United States. Quoting Palestinian security sources, the Israeli daily Ma’ariv reported Monday that Kamal Hamad had been paid a million dollars and promised a new identity by the Shin Bet.

Mohammed Taha, one of Hamas’s founders, said at Ayyash’s funeral Saturday, which drew more than 100,000 Palestinians, that the killing would not stop the group’s holy war, or ‘jihad’.

“Jihad is the only form of dialogue,” he said. “His killing proves once again that Israel’s claims about peace are false.”

To forestall revenge, Israel clamped a ‘closure’ order on the West Bank and Gaza, which means Palestinians cannot travel between the two areas or into Israel. It also declared the Palestinian self-ruled enclaves in the West Bank closed to Israeli citizens.

The move further stifles Palestinian efforts to organise the vote and the campaign in the West Bank and Gaza, separated by an hour’s drive through Israel.