This article is more than 21 years oldObituarySalah Shehada
This article is more than 21 years oldRadical guerrilla leader who widened popular support for HamasIf progress towards Middle East peace consists largely of one small step forward and two massive steps back, the Israeli assassination of the Hamas guerrilla leader, Salah Mustafa Shehada, at the age of 50, is yet another display of such deadly manoeuvring. It recalls similar Israeli strikes and their consequences, for example the killing of the Hamas bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash, "the Engineer", in January 1996, after which 58 Israelis died in bombings and shootings within two months.
In fact, it was Sheikh (the honorary title for a man of religion and respect) Shehada who recruited Ayyash into Hamas and its military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, in the first place. For Israel's security forces, who had been hunting Shehada for the past two years and who regarded him as the most wanted man in Hamas, the assassination was a palpable hit. Israel believed he was behind most of the attacks on Israelis in (and from) the Gaza Strip during the past two years.
But he was even more important to Israel, and to his own Palestinian movement, than his military/terror record would indicate - he was regarded as a prime organiser and source of local inspiration and therefore recruitment to Hamas, whose power and danger increase in tandem with Israel's intensification of its occupation.
Shehada was born in Beit Hanoun, a village at the northern tip of the Gaza Strip, son of a humble Palestinian Arab refugee family whom Jewish fighters had forced out of Jaffa, 35 miles to the north, during the 1948 war. Like so many refugees, he grew up radical and intensely religious, educated first in schools run by the UN Palestinian specialist refugee agency, then at Cairo University, where he took a degree in social sciences; like Yasser Arafat 20 or so years earlier, while there he would have made contact with like-minded Palestinian and other Arab radicals and, almost inevitably, have joined or at least fraternised with the Moslem Brotherhood.
Back in Gaza, he became one of the original founders, with its present leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, of that by-product of the Moslem Brotherhood, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas (the word also means "zeal"), in the early 1980s. Then, Palestinian ideas of self-determination and an end to Israeli occupation were burgeoning among the young generation in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza, replacing the shock and despond after the defeat in the six-day war in 1967. Shehada's base was the Islamic University in Gaza City, which is for Hamas and its supporters the fount of ideas, organisation and activity.
In 1984, the Israelis jailed Shehada for two years for his underground political work, releasing him in time to take the Palestinian/Islamic effort a significant stage further at the beginning of the first Intifada, or uprising, towards the end of 1987. With a few others, he began the military wing of Hamas, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, named after a Palestinian fighter-preacher killed by British police during the Mandate.
The Israelis arrested Shehada in 1988, jailing him for 10 years, in time for him to emerge into the final and bloody years of the Oslo experiment. By this time, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades he had launched had become a highly effective, if primitively armed, force - authors of a campaign against the Israelis and Israeli targets, including settlers.
Under Shehada, the brigades built, and launched, the Qassam-1 and Qassam-2 field rockets, with a range of a mile or two, and a variety of bombs, grenades and tank traps; they also developed more effective guerrilla tactics. But up against such an impregnable military giant, what was more important about Shehada were his skills as a recruiting officer, his radicalism, and his campaigning abilities - reflected in a popular support for Hamas now that stretches far beyond its hard Islamic core.
He was close to his old colleague, the Hamas leader, Sheikh Yassin, a revered figure whom Shehada admired, but was also said to want to replace. The previous leader of the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades was assassinated in a similar manner, by an air strike, last November, an indication that the Israelis are trying to make sure that Sheikh Yassin has as few effective successors as possible.
Palestinians believe these "targeted killings", as the Israelis call them, have a more sinister motive and are designed by the present Israel leadership to maintain the violence in the territories, enabling Israel to reduce the Palestinians physically to a point of compliance where Israel can enforce a zone of control over them indefinitely. Shehada's publicly stated belief was that there should be no quarter given and no deals, not with Israel or the Palestinian Authority, which has tried with little lasting result to rein in Hamas and others like-minded. There should, he said, be no end to armed attacks and suicide bombings. He told a Jordanian weekly magazine a couple of months ago: "We don't fight the Jews because they are Jews... we fight them because they occupy our lands and home."
Salah Shehada had a wife Leila, aged 45, and a daughter, Iman, of 15, both of whom died with him in the air strike against their home.
· Salah Mustafa Shehada, guerrilla leader, born 1952; died July 22 2002
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