Armed Islamists have long been the lethal wild card in the Dead Man's Hand of the Mideast peace table.
Advertisement
More than a dozen years ago, when a newly-elected Yitzhak Rabin set out to make peace with the Palestinians, his initial public prelude was to order more than 400 Hamas and Islamic Jihad officials rounded up and summarily deported to a snowy hillside in south Lebanon.
This week, determined to seek a halt in militant rocket attacks and bombings against Israelis, Mahmoud Abbas had only been in Gaza for a few hours on Monday when the military wing of Hamas drove home its answer: a suicide bombing that ripped through a Shin Bet interrogation room beside a key settler-area intersection, killing one agent and wounding seven other Israelis.
Though their ranks are shadowy, their forces constantly underground, ever on the run from Israeli raids, militant Islamic groups keep their aims neither secret nor in the least hidden. They want the Jewish state eradicated, erased on maps and in fact, replaced by a Palestinian state from the Jordan River in the east to the Ayalon River in Tel Aviv, from Metulla in the north to the Red Sea at Eilat - one nation under Allah and His Koran, indivisible.
Their imagery speaks of cold steel, nobility in conquest, honor in self-defense. But their weapons of choice are bomb belts and rockets, their targets, often as not, non-combatants, among them the elderly, the pregnant, pre-schoolers, the Arab Israeli, the non-Israeli.
The following is the second in a series of profiles of the principle armed groups of the Intifada.
IZ AL-DIN AL-QASSAM BRIGADES
FOUNDED: Early 1991, some three years after the formal establishment - during the opening week of the first intifada - of its parent organization, the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its acronym Hamas, Arabic for zeal or bravery.
By the time PLO and Fatah chief Yasser Arafat returned from exile to head the fledgling PA in early 1994, the wider Hamas movement had become a virtual parallel government in the Strip.
It won sweeping popular support with smoothly functioning social welfare agencies, a marked lack of corruption, a disciplined organization, and a military-industrial underground named for Iz al-Din al-Qassam, a Syrian-born militant who attacked Jewish villages in pre-State Palestine, killed by the British in 1935.
Iz al-Din al-Qassam was an outgrowth of two armed organizations founded during the mid-1980s by Hamas founder, moving spirit and ultimate arbiter Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. The charismatic, wheelchair bound Yassin first rose to prominence as a leader of the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza City's Islamic University, where he led a student group also named Hamas.
FORCES UNDER ARMS: Current estimates - 1,000 to 1,500 men.
TACTICS: At first, the gunmen of the Al-Qassam Brigades targeted the many Gazans suspected of collaboration with Israel.
In December, 1991, the Al-Qassam Brigades turned to killing Israelis. Their first victim was Doron Shorshan, a resident of the Gaza settlement of Kfar Darom.
A succession of drive-by shootings of Israeli civilians and kidnap/execution-style killings of IDF soldiers followed, culminating in the October, 14, 1994 shooting death of abducted IDF Corporal Nahshon Wachsman, 20.
In April, 1994, Al-Qassam launched the modern era of suicide bombings, killing 13 people in successive attacks in Afula and Hadera. Hamas said the attacks were in retaliation for the February massacre of 29 Palestinians in a Hebron mosque by settler Baruch Goldstein.
Five days after the October, 1994 Wachsman killing, a Hamas member detonated a bomb belt on a crowded Number 5 bus on Dizengoff Street in the heart of Tel Aviv, killing 22.
In early 1996, Hamas bomb mastermind Yihya Ayyash was assassinated in the explosion of a booby-trapper cell phone. The Qassam Brigades retaliated in late February, killing scores of Israelis in an unprecedented spate of suicide bombings in central Jerusalem in the space of nine days.
The bombings cost then-prime minister Shimon Peres a dominating 20-point lead in polls over Likud upstart Benjamin Netanyahu, who went on to defeat Peres in a May election.
SHIFT TO SHELLING: During the first 18 months of the Intifada, suicide bombings increased in frequency, as the Fatah Al Aqsa Martyrs emulated Hamas and Jihad methodology, and a budding culture of celebrating suicide "martyrs" was bolstered by cash grants of up to $25,000 to the families of bombers, with funds from a number of sources, including Saddan Hussein's Iraq and donations to Islamic charities overseas.
A number of Israeli military and political moves beginning in 2002 caused a sharp shift in the focus of Hamas attacks.
-- Major IDF ground operations and assassination raids in stirred upheaval in the disciplined Hamas command structure.
-- The construction of the northern section of the West Bank barrier choked off the suicide bomber lanes that had led from Jenin and Nablus to Israeli cities.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gradually revealed his announced his disengagement plan for a withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and a small part of the West Bank.
Hamas, keen to claim the pull-out as a victory for its ideology of uncompromising violent struggle - with its model the crowing of Hezbollah over the abrupt IDF withdrawal from south Lebanon in mid-2000 - then shifted its emphasis to the Strip.
On a number of occasions, Hamas bombers used tunnels to detonate large charges against IDF targets.
Al-Qassam weapons technicians developed successive models of homemade Qassam rockets and small-range mortars, thousands of which were fired at Gaza settlements, at the western Negev city of Sderot, and adjacent Israeli border kibbutzim - many of them leftist in outlook.
At the same time, another development helped to foster Al-Qassam's activities:
JOINT OPERATIONS: Over the past year, nearly all Hamas-linked terror attacks in Gaza were described as joint operations, with responsibility claimed by Iz al-Din al-Qassam along with the Al-Aqsa Brigades of Fatah, and the Islamic Jihad or the Popular Resistance Committees.
The principal reason for the "joint operation" designation, says Haaretz territories commentator Arnon Regular, was to shield the late Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat from having to act on international pressure to crack down on Hamas.
As a consequence, "joint operations were always an excuse and a means for Hamas to continue its terror attacks," Regular says. "If the attacks were carried out only by one group, the international community would come down on Arafat, demanding 'Why don't you do something about Hamas?'"
Simultaneous claims of responsibility by a number of militant groups, especially the loosely organized Fatah Al Aqsa Brigades, "suited Arafat very well. The joint declartions were intended in part to lessen world pressure on Arafat to take action. The Authority could then plead that 'Our main problem is not Hamas, but rather the balagan [mess] that exists within Fatah.'"
"When you define the problem as one of complete chaos," Regular continues, "you can argue that the source of the problem cannot be pinpointed, and that it is most difficult to get a handle on it."
COMMAND: Until 2003, the command structure of Hamas remained hierarchical, centralized and disciplined, despite wholesale arrests, deportations, and re-arrests of key figures. Although the two bodies were formally separate, the Qassam commanders took their cues from the Hamas nominally political mainstream movement's founders.
In the course of the Intifada, however, a string of Israeli assassinations appears to have loosened somewhat the homogeneity of Hamas leadership and outlook.
They included the July, 2002 assassination of Salah Shehada, the overall commander of Iz al-Din al-Qassam, as well as a close aide to Yassin, seen by many as a possible heir to the cleric. The assassination, in which an IDF warplane dropped a one-ton bomb on Shehada's house in Gaza, also killed more than a dozen people in the structure, many of them children.
In the highest-stakes gamble of the conflict, Israel assassinated Sheikh Yassin and his second in command, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, within six weeks of one-another last spring. Hamas vowed "unprecedented revenge," but was foiled in a number of attempts to make good on the vow, a delay that may have cost the organization a measure of grass-roots support.
Recently there have been signs that the command and decision-making structure is beginning to fray. Conflicting signals have been sounded by Khaled Mashal, the Damascus-based senior Hamas international official, who has hewn to the hard line, and by West Bank Sheikh Hassan Yusif, who has hinted at the possibility of coexistence with Israel.
Iz al-Din al-Qassam, seen as taking its orders from Hamas officials hosted by Syria, has rejected any calls for a mutual truce with Israel
Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, offers real-time breaking news, opinions and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.
