Corpus Christi Caller Times Caller.com - Hamas says it is pleased by bomb toll

Marketplace \| Services \| Contact Us \| Community \| Arts & Entertainment \| Local Guides

Published by the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. CLICK FOR NEWSPAPER DELIVERY

Thursday, April 4, 2002
Hamas says it is pleased by bomb toll

By Joel Brinkley
New York Times News Service
   Leaders of group seek destruction of Israel
   GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - The leaders of Hamas, the militant Islamic movement responsible for the most deadly suicide attacks in Israel in the last week, are pleased and satisfied just now.
   "Our spirit is high, our mood is good," said Ismail Abu Shanab, one of the organization's principal leaders.
   By their estimation, the organization's two recent attacks - the one on Passover night in a Netanya hotel that killed 25 people at a Seder, and the other in a Haifa cafe that killed 15 - were the most successful they have ever made. That is true partly, Shanab said, because Hamas is now using weapons-grade explosives instead of homemade bombs manufactured using fertilizer, a fact the Israelis have confirmed.
   40 killed, 200 injured
   "Forty were killed and 200 injured - in just two operations," another of the leaders, Dr. Mahmoud al-Zahar, a surgeon, said with a smile.
   What's more, Hamas believes that the Palestinian Authority has given up on negotiating with Israel, negotiations that Hamas virulently opposed. That has led to a budding alliance between Hamas and Fatah, the organization headed by Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, despite years of bitter and sometimes violent feuding.
   Arafat "is Palestinian and I am Palestinian," said Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas. "We have the same problem now. Israel is our enemy."
   Sammy Abu Samhadanah, a Fatah commander here, said Hamas was carrying out attacks "because they did not want a peace agreement.
   "But now," he added, "we have a common enemy."
   Eradication of Israel
   Hamas, the second most popular Palestinian movement, behind Fatah, is directed by a "steering committee," as Zahar put it, with five principal members. Interviews with four of them - a cleric, an engineer and two medical doctors - showed a leadership unyielding, determined and increasingly confident of achieving its goal: the eradication of Israel as a Jewish state.
   Hamas wants Israeli withdrawal from all of the West Bank and Gaza, the dismantling of all Israeli settlements and full right of return for the four million Palestinians who live in other states. After that, the Jews could remain, living "in an Islamic state with Islamic law," Zahar said. "From our ideological point of view, it is not allowed to recognize that Israel controls one square meter of historic Palestine."
   Shenab insisted that he was not joking when he said, "There are a lot of open areas in the United States that could absorb the Jews."
   'Effective strategy'
   The Hamas leaders are clearly enamored of the suicide attacks carried out by their followers. "It is the most effective strategy for us," said Rantisi. "For us it is the same as their F-16," the attack fighters used by the Israeli military.
   For them, the crowning achievement so far was the attack on Passover eve.
   "That was a great success," said Shenab. "We don't have an army, but we showed that one person can do more than an army - and in the middle of a big alert by the Israelis." That night, the Israeli police and the military were on full alert to stop suicide bombers. "That showed that if we suffer, our enemy suffers more," he added.

| Talk about this story | Next Story | Home |

[ Printer-friendly version ]
[ Subscribe to newspaper ]

SEND THIS PAGE TO A FRIEND