Bungled Attack Leaves Israel on Defensive

JERUSALEM —  The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, swept up in a growing political storm over a bungled assassination attempt, broke its official silence on the affair Sunday by defending Israel’s right to fight terrorism “without compromise.”

But the government stopped short of officially admitting what various aides have said privately: that Israeli Mossad agents carried out the Sept. 25 attack on Khaled Meshaal, a leader of the militant Islamic movement Hamas in Amman, the Jordanian capital.

The botched attack--widely viewed here as the worst blunder in the history of Israel’s vaunted intelligence services--has plunged the Netanyahu government into a domestic political crisis, damaged relations with Jordan, Israel’s closest Arab ally, and overshadowed the latest U.S.-led effort to revive peace talks with the Palestinians.

The attack has dominated Israeli newspapers and radio talk shows, which have carried almost uniformly critical accounts of its planning and execution. Several commentators and opposition lawmakers have called on Netanyahu and Mossad director Maj. Gen. Danny Yatom to resign.

More fallout is expected today, when Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin, whose release last week from an Israeli prison has been linked to the affair, is expected to make a triumphal return from Jordan to the Gaza Strip.

Israeli radio reports said that the ailing Yassin will be flown from Amman to the West Bank city of Ramallah to meet Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and that the two will fly to Gaza City for a welcome expected to draw thousands. But an Israeli official said the journey will not take place unless Jordan releases the two men being held in the Amman attack.

In its first official comment about the attack on Meshaal, the government did not directly address reports of Israel’s involvement. But in a brief statement released after the weekly Cabinet meeting, it appeared to try to justify the attack, describing Meshaal as the “No. 1 figure in Hamas” and accusing him of responsibility for the deaths of Israeli civilians.

An Israeli government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Mossad was ordered to assassinate Meshaal because the Hamas leader had personally authorized two suicide bombing attacks in Jerusalem carried out in July and September that killed 26 people, including the five bombers, and injured hundreds of others. “He was a natural target,” the official said.

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In the midmorning incident in Amman, two men carrying Canadian passports approached Meshaal outside his office, held a strange weapon up to his ear and sprayed or injected a poison chemical into him. Meshaal was hospitalized but recovered with the help of an antidote, reportedly provided by Israel at the insistence of Jordan’s King Hussein.

Canada, outraged over the use of forged or altered Canadian passports in the attack, has recalled its ambassador from Israel for consultations.

The attack also infuriated the Jordanian king and brought Israeli-Jordanian relations, already strained by differences over the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, to the brink of collapse. In an interview published Sunday, Hussein, whose nation signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, called the attack a “reckless act carried out by a party that has no faith in peace.”

The king did not specifically link Israel to the assassination attempt but called on the Israeli government to honor its peace agreement with Jordan. He also criticized Netanyahu: “I am personally unable to reach a conclusion as to how the Israeli prime minister thinks,” Hussein said in the interview with the London-based newspaper Al Hayat. “This makes me very worried.

“In every meeting . . . we hear about intentions, about determination to continue the peace process, but a great deal of what we had expected has not been translated into reality that is being felt by the people,” he said. “Matters, in fact, are going in the other direction, in the direction of despair.”

But in a move Israeli analysts interpreted as a signal that the king will allow the two countries’ relations to return to a semblance of normalcy, Hussein on Sunday accepted the credentials of Israel’s new ambassador to Jordan, Oded Eran. The ceremony was scheduled before the attack, officials said.

Also Sunday, an Israeli official denied a report in London’s Sunday Times that Netanyahu, outraged by the Hamas suicide bombings in Jerusalem, had dismissed Yatom’s misgivings about carrying out the attack in Jordan and ordered the Mossad chief to proceed.

“That’s the exact opposite of what happened,” the government official said. “It was Mossad’s plan which was brought to the prime minister and then approved.”

The comments could signal the beginning of an effort by Netanyahu’s government to deflect criticism about the botched attack, turning it toward the intelligence service that planned and carried it out.

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But that could prove difficult. On Sunday, opposition lawmakers called for an official inquiry and commentators offered withering criticism of Netanyahu.

“It is inconceivable that a failure of such magnitude and such strategic blindness be allowed to pass without those responsible resigning or being fired,” the respected military commentator Zeev Schiff wrote in the daily Haaretz.

“In well-ordered countries, prime ministers and Cabinet ministers resign over such things, not just the intelligence chiefs,” Schiff wrote.

The continuing reverberations of the Meshaal affair, along with Yassin’s expected return to Gaza, are expected to overshadow the arrival in Israel today of U.S. envoy Dennis B. Ross and the scheduled renewal of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. The negotiations, broken off for more than six months, are set to resume today.