Top Hamas Leader in Gaza City Killed; Abdel Aziz Rantisi Slain in Israeli Missile Strike

Byline: John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore

JERUSALEM, April 17 -- Abdelaziz Rantisi, who became the Gaza Strip leader of the radical Palestinian group Hamas just four weeks ago after its spiritual leader and founder was slain in an Israeli attack, was killed Saturday night in an Israeli missile strike on his car in Gaza City, Palestinian hospital officials and witnesses said.

The hard-line Rantisi, 54, was perhaps the most renowned and popular leader of Hamas, officially known as the Islamic Resistance Movement. His vitriolic assaults on Israel and its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip made him a towering figure in Gaza who could order a demonstration and within hours mobilize tens of thousands of Palestinians in the streets.

Rantisi was killed about 8:30 p.m. when two Israeli missiles demolished a white Subaru sedan in which he was traveling about a block from his home in the Sheik Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City, according to a news account carried on the Hamas website. Two of his personal bodyguards -- Akram Nassar, 35, and another man who had not been identified late Saturday -- were also killed in the attack, hospital officials said.

Graphic film on al Jazeera Arab satellite television network showed gruesomely charred bodies from the attack being carried into Gaza's Shifa Hospital. Cameras that followed Rantisi into the emergency room showed doctors frantically working over a torso splattered with puncture wounds and slash marks.

"Israel will regret this -- revenge is coming," senior Hamas political leader Ismail Haniya told reporters at the hospital after Rantisi was pronounced dead, according to Reuters news service. "This blood will not be wasted. . . . The battle will not weaken our determination or break our will."

"This is just deepening the slide into a lose-lose situation between the Israelis and Palestinians," said Saeb Erekat, chief negotiator for the Palestinians. "Sharon thinks he can solve problems with incursions and assassinations. This will only add fuel to the fire."

A few hours before the strike against Rantisi, a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated explosives near the northern Gaza Strip's Erez border crossing into Israel, killing an Israeli border police officer and injuring two other border policemen and one Israeli citizen, according to a statement released by the Israeli Defense Forces. The attack occurred at a terminal where laborers cross into an Israeli border industrial zone. It was the fourth Palestinian attack near the Erez crossing this year.

"We are preventing terrorist attacks, and part of the prevention is to go after terrorists like Rantisi," said Gideon Meir, deputy director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. "Anyone who will replace him and will continue this business of terrorism against Israel is a legitimate target."

A pediatrician by profession, Rantisi became the head of Hamas in Gaza on March 23, a day after Israeli helicopters fired three missiles at Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the wheelchair-bound founder of Hamas, and killed him as he was being pushed home from morning prayers at a local mosque. Seven other Palestinians died in that attack.

With the killings of Rantisi and Yassin and the targeted killing of another senior Hamas political activist, Ismail Abu Shanab, last August, Israel has removed the most charismatic and senior leaders of Hamas in Gaza. The leadership mantle will now be most likely be passed to Haniya or Mahmoud Zahar, a senior political figure in the group whose house was destroyed by Israeli missiles in a failed assassination attempt.

Saturday's missile attack flipped Rantisi's white Subaru onto its roof, flattening the vehicle with the passengers inside. Rescue workers and passersby struggled to pull the badly maimed and bloodied bodies from the shredded wreckage in footage aired by al Jazeera. As one body was extracted and carried away on a stretcher, a medical worker followed closely behind clutching an unidentifiable body part dripping with blood.

Thousands of Palestinian protesters converged on the scene of the attack and Shifa hospital, screaming vows of revenge. Demonstrators burned tires in the streets, mosques blared verses from the Koran and militants fired bursts from AK-47 assault rifles across the city.

Last June, Rantisi and his 19-year-old son, Ahmed, were seriously injured in an Israeli missile strike on their car that killed his bodyguard and two bystanders. Since then, he had adopted extraordinary security precautions and rarely was seen in public -- and then only in large crowds.

Saturday's killing followed a major summit in Washington Wednesday during which President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon renewed their vows to work together to wipe out Palestinian terrorism as a prerequisite to establishing an independent Palestinian state. Bush overturned years of U.S. policy during the meeting by announcing new U.S. positions against the return of Palestinian refugees to the state of Israel and in favor of allowing Israel to retain some Jewish settlements in the West Bank in any final peace deal.

Following the summit, Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, the top leader of the group who is based in Damascus, said in an interview with Reuters that Bush's policy marked the end of "illusions that there can be a U.S.-sponsored political settlement" and proved "that resistance is the only way."

A news account carried on the Hamas Web site tonight said, "The terrorist Sharon government, with American assistance, escalated its war against the Islamic Resistance Movement."

Rantisi, who spoke fluent English and frequently was quoted in the American press, often insisted that Palestinians would not relinquish their claim to Israel, believing that all land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea would ultimately fall to Palestinian control and ownership.

In recent years, like many other Hamas leaders, he had moderated his message, even suggesting that Hamas could enter into a long-term ceasefire with Israel. But most Hamas analysts believed that such statements simply illustrated Rantisi's pragmatic side, and that he never softened his real goal of destroying the state of Israel.

Portly, bearded and bespectacled, the firebrand Rantisi was particularly popular with Hamas's guerrilla fighters. Although technically a member of the group's political wing and one of its founders, he was considered the key intermediary in Gaza between the political side of the organization and its military faction, called the Ezzedeem Kassam Brigade.

On the day Rantisi took over as the Gaza leader of Hamas, he told thousands of supporters at the city soccer stadium that his organization would strike Israel wherever possible.

"We will chase them everywhere," he told the crowd. "We will teach them lessons in confrontation."

Special correspondent Islam Abdulkarim contributed to this report from Gaza City.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Washingtonpost Newsweek Interactive
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group