Background / Assassins no longer avoid hurting innocents

Since 1995, 10 passersby have been killed in the cross fire of gangland wars between criminals in Israel, and seven of them have been in the past year - three yesterday - while dozens have been wounded.

Despite the proliferation of incidents from Ashkelon to Hadera this year, the police say there is no wave of interconnected incidents of counter-attacks but rather a coincidence of a number of power struggles between various gangs.

Yesterday's violence shows just how difficult it is for the police to deal with the assassinations. If in the past the assassins waited in ambush for their targets in "sterile" areas, making sure no innocents were nearby, the recent series of assassinations and attempted killings shows that the hired killers no longer worry about harming innocents.

The police, which often managed to foil attempted assassinations when they took place in isolated places, can no longer predict where the assassin will choose as a venue for an attack.

Thus, only a month ago, Daniel and Ella Nahshon of Pardes Hanna were killed when a hand grenade blew up in a Hadera used car lot where they were shopping for a car. Sarah Ben Adiri got into an elevator on Yitzhak Sadeh Street in Tel Aviv in August and was killed by a bomb hidden in the elevator shaft, apparently meant for a known underworld figure who has an office in the building. Shaked Shelhov, 16, of Ashkelon, was shot to death when someone tried killing her boyfriend, also a known criminal.

"The real tragedy in these cases, and especially the one in Tel Aviv, is not the assassination attempt by the criminals but the fact the assassins knew they were going to hurt innocent people," said a senior police officer yesterday. "Their cold-bloodedness is very frightening, and it makes it very difficult for the police to foil them. They are daring and ruthless and don't care about anything."

Ze'ev Rosenstein, the target of yesterday's assassination, who got away with slight wounds on his hand and leg, has been saved a number of times by police intervention just before assassins were going to strike. Yesterday's deadly bomb was a measure of just how much his rivals and enemies want him dead.

But the senior officer warned the Tel Aviv police that a wave of arrests is not the answer to the problem exposed so baldly yesterday, and said the incident was a stain on the record of officers in the Tel Aviv police intelligence department. "The wise thing is to prevent such incidents and not merely investigate them after the fact. If the Tel Aviv police conduct a wave of arrests now, it will mostly show they are panicking and have lost control."

	Police sifting through the rubble for clues at the site of yesterday's attempted hit on underworld kingpin Ze'ev Rosenstein.
	Photo by: Uriel Sinai