Just 10 days ago, during cease fire talks between Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, and Hamas leaders, Abu Mazen had warned Rantisi that he might be high on Israel’s hit list despite his crucial role in the fragile peace process. “I can’t guarantee that you won’t be attacked when you leave my offices,” he told the Hamas leader, according to Palestinian’s chief negotiator with the radical group, Ziad Abu Amr.
Abu Mazen’s words proved prophetic. At 11 a.m. today, two Apache helicopters swooped in from the Negev Desert and hovered over a crowded neighborhood of eastern Gaza City. A single Hellfire missile slammed into the Jeep in which Rantisi was traveling along with his son and at two bodyguards. But the rocket was a misfire, striking the hood of the vehicle and only injuring the Hamas leader, who staggered out with his son and one guard and fled down the street. Moments later, five more missiles struck the jeep, killing one guard and two Palestinian passersby–a middle-aged woman and an 8-year-old girl. An estimated 27 people were reported wounded, including Rantisi’s son. The rockets also blew out dozens of windows in a 55-flat apartment block across the street, left a three-foot deep crater in the ground and reduced the Jeep to a blackened shell.
The attempted killing of Rantisi, the chief mouthpiece and one of the top political operatives of the radical group Hamas, also threatened to leave the Roadmap in ashes as well. Less than a week ago, U.S. President W. George Bush arrived in Aqaba amid a wave of optimism to launch the ambitious peace plan alongside Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Abu Mazen.
Working from a carefully choreographed script, Sharon denounced the occupation of Palestinian land, promised to remove illegal settlements in the West Bank and pledged to ease closure and other harsh conditions that have made life miserable for two million Palestinians. Abu Mazen, in his turn, called for an end to the “armed intifada” that began in September 2000. But the brief euphoria that followed the handshakes and soaring rhetoric at the seaside Jordanian resort faded in less than 48 hours. Bush had barely returned to Washington before the cycle of strike and retaliation resumed–and the Roadmap began to resemble the dozen other failed attempts to broker a peace deal over the past two-and-a-half years of violence.
This time, the pattern was depressingly familiar: on Thursday night, Israeli Defense Forces stormed a house in the West Bank town of Tulkarm and shot dead two Hamas militants who, security forces said, were planning an attack on Israelis. Ceasefire talks broke down the next day between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA), amid accusations by the radicals that Abbas had given away too much at Aqaba and failed to uphold the Palestinians’ “legitimate” right to resist the Israeli occupation.
Then came the attack that led directly to the Rantisi hit. A suicide squad consisting of militants from Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades–the armed wing of Fatah–carried out a daring attack on an Israeli military checkpoint at the Erez border crossing in Gaza. Disguised as Israeli soldiers, the group joined a group of Palestinian workers filing into a border industrial zone and then opened fire on unsuspecting Israeli troops with grenades and M-16s, killing four and injuring seven others before being shot dead. Later on Sunday, Palestinian gunmen launched two attacks on Israeli soldiers in the West Bank city of Hebron, killing one soldier and wounding another. Two gunmen were also killed.
The White House said that President Bush was “deeply troubled” by the attempted killing of Rantisi and concerned that it could delay efforts to implement the Roadmap. “The president is concerned that the strike will undermine efforts by Palestinian authorities and others to bring an end to terrorist attacks and does not contribute to the security of Israel,” spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters.
Hamas vowed revenge, and said that Israel would be “punished” for its “crime.” But even as Israeli citizens braced themselves for a new wave of suicide bombings, the government of Ariel Sharon defended the strike and offered no indication that it would call off its campaign of targeted killings against suspected militants. “Abdel Aziz Rantisi serves as the head of the military wing of Hamas in Gaza,” claimed the Israeli Defense Forces in a written statement issued shortly after the attempted killing. “He is known as an extremist within Hamas who has consistently opposed negotiations with the PA for any type of cease-fire.” The IDF accused Rantisi of ordering Sunday’s suicide attack at the Erez Crossing and also claimed that he has been responsible “for ordering attacks using Kassam rockets, infiltration into Israeli neighborhoods to kill citizens, roadside bombs targeting tanks and other IDF vehicles, shootings, ambushes, explosive boats, suicide bombers and planned kidnappings.”
Eight hours after the attack on Rantisi, the tit-for-tat violence flared again. At 7 this evening, two more Israeli Hellfire missiles slammed into a four-door sedan on the outskirts of the Jabaliya neighborhood in Gaza City, a few hundred yards from the Green Line dividing Gaza from Israel. The two passengers were mortally wounded and staggered into a house across the street, where they died. A woman bystander was also killed in the explosion. Witnesses to the attack identified the dead men as Hahmoud and Mohammed Abed Raboo, both in their late teens or early 20s, first cousins and members of Hamas’s military wing in Gaza City.
According to Jabaliya residents, the two militants had just finished firing four homemade rockets at the Israeli town of Sderot, just across the Gaza border, and were returning to their home when an Israeli Apache helicopter targeted them. The rocket launches and the subsequent assassinations were indications that the cycle of attack and retaliation has both quickened and intensified in the days since the Aqaba summit.
Rantisi has long been a thorn in the side of the Israeli government. In December 1992, five years after he co-founded Hamas, Rantisi was expelled to Lebanon with 415 other Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants. After his return to Gaza in the mid-1990s, Rantisi, who speaks near-fluent English, joined forces with Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin, and according to Israel, helped to reinvigorate the Hamas military wing. (Rantisi has insisted, perhaps disingenuously, that he is strictly a political figure and has no contact with those who plan and carry out attacks against Israel.) Regarded as one of the most articulate members of the rejectionist wing of Hamas, he has repeatedly expressed the group’s determination to continue its attacks against Israel in defiance of renewed efforts to find a political settlement. “The Hamas response to the Roadmap is to continue with its only option: the struggle, the resistance and suicide attacks,” he declared on an Islamic Jihad web site last April.
Is there any way to salvage the Roadmap? In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Palestinian Authority negotiator Abu Amr called the strike on Rantisi “an unwarranted attack [carried out with] bad timing that will undermine the Roadmap and frustrate our efforts to achieve a truce with Hamas.” Abu Amr spoke to Rantisi and other Hamas leaders a dozen times throughout the day, trying to calm down emotions, but the PA official believes that a suicide bombing inside Israel in the coming days is inevitable. (Rantisi was treated for a leg injury at a Gaza City hospital and then whisked away to a hideout.) Abu Amr urged the United States to push Ariel Sharon to call a moratorium on assassinations of Palestinian militants. Only then, Abu Amr said, could the PA induce the Hamas rejectionists to declare a hudna–a temporary truce. “Words are not enough,” he told NEWSWEEK. “The United States has clout that goes beyond words. President Bush must interfere with the Israelis.” Abu Amr said that yesterday evening he had sat down with militants from a dozen factions in Gaza, including Hamas, and heard them express their willingness to keep talking about a ceasefire. That willingness may have evaporated with the attempted killing of Rantisi. “I can’t talk to them about a truce now,” he said. “Without guarantees from the other side, I don’t have any credibility.”
Abu Amr said that Israel’s demands that the PA collect weapons from the radicals was totally unrealistic. The weakness of the security forces and the militants’ continuing popularity on the Palestinian street would doom any attempt to move against the groups, he believes. “This would create a civil war in Palestinian society,” he told NEWSWEEK. “Morally and politically we won’t go into an internal, bloody fight for any reason. It isn’t worth it.” Instead, he declared, the PA’s strategy is to use “rational dialogue” to persuade the militants that laying down their arms for a test period would benefit the Palestinian people. “We want to start with a hudna,” he said. “Then if it yields positive results, we could carry it one step further. Ultimately, if it becomes a productive process, the need for weapons would grow less and less.”
At the moment, the prospects for a hudna seem more remote than ever. As the sun set over Gaza City this evening, crowds of angry shebab–young men and teenagers-milled about the car that was half incinerated by missiles 30 minutes earlier. Ambulance workers had removed the bodies of the three victims from the house where they’d tried to take refuge, but puddles of blood and bloody footprints on the staircase marked their last, agonizing minutes of life. “This is not the road to peace,” shouted one agitated onlooker. A bulldozer roared up to the wrecked car, scooped it up and carried it off toward a nearby junkyard. As it rumbled down the street, someone cried out a warning–“An Israeli tank is coming”–and the crowd surged, panic stricken, away from the attack site. Pandemonium ensued. Frightened drivers threw their cars into reverse gear; one boy narrowly avoided being caught under the wheels of a careening donkey cart. For the moment, at least, the Roadmap seems to be leading Israelis and Palestinians only deeper into the abyss.
