Obituary: Salah Shehada

* Military leader. Died in his late 40s.

To the Palestinians, Salah Shehada was an Islamic hero in life and a martyr in death.

To the Israelis, he was a master terrorist who sent his men to murder hundreds of Israeli civilians and soldiers over more than a decade. He topped Israel's list of most-wanted men.

In a strike on Tuesday night an F-16 warplane caught up with him, bombing the two-storey Gaza house where he and his family had taken refuge.

Shehada served as the commander of Hamas fighters in the northern Gaza Strip, but Israel also held him responsible for deadly operations within its borders and on the West Bank.

These included suicide bombings of a pizza parlour, a coffee shop and a pedestrian precinct in Jerusalem, a Tel Aviv discotheque, and the Passover-eve attack on a crowded Netanya hotel dining-room.

The Israelis say he was also behind the killing in March of five students in Gaza and of 19 passengers on a Jerusalem bus in June.

Palestinian sources confirmed the scope and lethal impact of his activities. He saw civilians as legitimate targets.

Israeli officers say he was more than a field commander. He supervised the purchase of weapons, built explosives workshops and developed the Qassam rocket fired against Israeli villages. He is said to have had contacts with Hamas leaders in Syria and Lebanon.

Shehada, who was trained as a social worker, was born in 1953 amid the squalid poverty of Gaza's Shati refugee camp, where his family fled during the 1948 war.

He was one of the founders in 1989 of Izz el-Deen al-Qassam, the military wing of Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement.

Hamas rejects a two-state solution. The movement's aim, frequently spelled out by its spiritual leader, the wheelchair-bound cleric Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, is the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic state in the whole of historic Palestine.

Shehada denounced Palestinian officials who met Israeli counterparts in an attempt to staunch the bloodshed after the intifada broke out in September 2000.

He dedicated his life to the Islamic holy war.

"Jihad," he told his followers, "is an option of God and we are not asking anybody's permission to continue it."

Shehada is said to have ordered the 1995 kidnapping of an Israeli soldier, Nachshon Wachsman, who was killed in a rescue attempt.



Shehada spent two years in an Israeli prison. Israel had repeatedly urged Yasser Arafat's Palestinian security forces to arrest him.

"In the end," Israeli military sources said, "we had to do it ourselves".I

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Feature: Middle East

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