Sharon Bets on Weakening Hamas

JERUSALEM —  As high-stakes gambles go, Monday’s assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin ranks as one of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s biggest rolls of the dice.

In eliminating Yassin, the aging, ailing founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, Sharon has wagered that the strike would leave the Islamic militant group’s disciples reeling and disoriented, undercutting their organizational effectiveness and sapping their will to carry out more attacks.

Sharon also appears to have calculated that the dramatic strike would help ensure that his plan to withdraw Israeli troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip was not interpreted by Palestinian militants as a sign of weakness. The prime minister may also believe the boldness of this move will boost his sagging political standing among Israelis, analysts say.

Yet even those Israeli officials who supported Sharon’s decision to kill Yassin are well aware that the cries for revenge ringing through the streets of Gaza are likely to herald yet more suicide bombings, which Hamas, during 42 months of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has turned into its trademark weapon.

The assassination could have other unintended consequences, including bolstering Hamas’ ties to other militant groups, sowing greater chaos in the Gaza Strip, and strengthening the position of Sharon’s bitter foe, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, who saw Yassin as his most powerful rival.

“The killing of Sheik Yassin is liable to open a cycle of bloodshed and exact a heavy and needless cost from Israel,” said Yossi Beilin, a veteran leftist politician who was one of the architects of a much-discussed but unofficial peace blueprint with the Palestinians.

Killing a figure as revered by Palestinians as Yassin was cited by some as the latest example of Sharon’s tendency to take matters into his own hands regardless of the consequences. The Israeli prime minister, who spent most of his adult life as a military man with a reputation for impetuousness on the battlefield, personally oversaw the strike against the Hamas founder, according to media reports and Israeli officials.

Sharon “is a person who believes that you solve things by force,” said Uzi Benzamin, a political columnist at the Haaretz newspaper and author of a biography of the leader. “Ever since he was a young soldier, he was more or less educated to believe you solve all problems by force.”

The decision to strike down the frail, half-blind cleric also fits into an increasingly familiar pattern of behavior on Sharon’s part -- that of unilateral action, as opposed to moves made in concert with the U.S. or after negotiations with the Palestinians.

Having refused to engage in substantive peace talks as long as Arafat holds the reins of power, the Israeli leader has begun constructing a barrier to partition off the West Bank, proposed the Gaza pullout as part of a larger plan to “disengage” from the Palestinians whether or not an accord is on the horizon, and sharply stepped up military action against Hamas and similar groups.

A number of Israeli security officials have likened the “targeted killings” of Palestinian militant leaders such as Yassin to cutting off the head of a snake. But some senior Israeli field commanders believe the analogy is a flawed one. Hamas and other militant groups, they note, have repeatedly shown themselves able to regroup and recoup, sometimes coming back even stronger after a key figure is killed or incapacitated.

“Cutting off the head of the snake? It’s more like mowing the grass,” a ranking Israeli general told journalists not long ago. “And grass always grows back.”

Israel has repeatedly liquidated successive chiefs of Hamas’ military wing, the Izzidin al-Qassam, but a new one is usually in place within days or even hours. After the 1996 assassination of Hamas’ then-most sophisticated bomb-making expert, Yehiya Ayash, known as “The Engineer,” the group’s ability to carry out attacks was temporarily hampered. But Hamas then made sure that technical know-how was better distributed down through the ranks.

Both Hamas sources and Israeli intelligence officials have indicated in the past that although Yassin was generally well-briefed about plans for suicide attacks in Israel, his tactical role was in fact a limited one. His real importance, they say, was as a figurehead and an inspiration -- a role that could be augmented rather than diminished by what his followers view as a perfectly scripted martyr’s end.

Yassin’s slaying comes seven months after Israel changed tactics and started targeting Hamas’ political leaders, as well as its military commanders. In August, Israeli helicopter gunships incinerated a vehicle carrying one of Hamas’ top political figures, Ismail abu Shanab, in a strike similar to the one that killed Yassin.

Abu Shanab’s assassination sent the Hamas leadership underground en masse, and led, Israeli officials believe, to a slowdown in suicide attacks, and in turn an easing up of the Israeli pressure on Hamas’ most senior officials.

But the bombings did not stop altogether. Even in the months that Israel had the entire Hamas leadership in its gun sights, the supply of foot soldiers willing and ready to carry out suicide attacks never dwindled. Moreover, the group’s classic and long-standing structure of small, semiautonomous cells helped to shield its operational arm from fallout due to changes at the top level of leadership, veteran observers of Hamas say.

Ali Jirbawi, a political scientist at Birzeit University outside the West Bank city of Ramallah, predicted that Sharon’s strike against Yassin would strengthen hard-liners on both sides and contribute to a climate of growing disorder.

“The message that Israel is sending is that all the top leaders of Hamas are targets from now on,” Jirbawi said.

Before this strike, Israel and the Palestinians had been exchanging an escalating series of blows in the wake of Sharon’s announced intention to withdraw from Gaza. Now, Yassin’s death may touch off a power struggle within Gaza, and Benzamin predicted that the killing of Yassin would only complicate any Israeli pullout from the coastal strip.

“It’s not coherent to say you want to disconnect from Gaza, but on the other hand do things that deepen your involvement,” he said.

Some observers see long-term potential, with Yassin’s death, for an altering of Hamas’ heretofore rigorously Islamic character. Mordechai Kedar, a lecturer at Bar-Ilan University, said Hamas had no possible leadership successor with Yassin’s credentials as a cleric, and might now lean more overtly toward its nationalist agenda.

“The situation is very fluid,” he said.

But a move toward greater secularism by Hamas might serve to cement the alliances with other less overtly Islamist militant groups such as Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, loosely affiliated with Arafat’s Fatah faction, which seeks Palestinian statehood but does not have a declared agenda of setting up an Islamic state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The death of Yassin may also give Arafat a chance to repair his battered political standing. In the slums of Gaza in particular, Hamas, with its network of schools and hospitals and charities, is seen as a helper of the poor and a defender of the downtrodden, while Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank, is seen as corrupt and inept. With Yassin gone, however, a leadership vacuum could restore some of the loyalty Arafat had lost.

But Arafat is also said to be deeply worried that he could be next on Sharon’s hit list. If Yassin’s status as a revered cleric did not protect him from a rain of Israeli missiles, Arafat’s aides fear, the Palestinian leader’s role as a living emblem of statehood aspirations may not be enough to keep him from being targeted as well.

While few Israelis would mourn Yassin, his demise stirred in many a strong sense of foreboding that a new explosion of violence was on the horizon.

“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long ceased to be about leadership and logic, control and decisions, cause and effect,” said commentator Ofer Shelah. “The conflict is currently a tribal war, ruled by vengeance. Ahmed Yassin lived and died by the sword, and in death, he bequeathed us nothing but more death.”

King reported from Washington and Ellingwood from Jerusalem.