Posted on 04/18/2004 2:19:42 PM PDT by Eurotwit
Khaled Mashaal, who has emerged as the paramount figure in Hamas following the assassination of Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi by Israel, is a hardline militant who favours a military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The Damascus-based Mashaal, head of Hamas' political bureau, said after Rantissi's death yesterday in an airstrike in Gaza City that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was seeking to "eliminate" Hamas, while insisting that the Islamic group "will not stop ... as this is the price of liberation."
"Select a leader for the movement in Gaza to replace our brother, martyr and fighter Abdel-Aziz Rantissi, but do not disclose his name," Mashaal said in an interview with the Qatar-based Arab satellite television network Al-Jazeera.
Hamas said yesterday that it had done just that, citing Mashaal's suggestion as an indication of his influence.
And Israeli Cabinet minister Gideon Ezra warned that "Mashaal's fate will be identical to that of Rantissi," Israel's military radio reported.
"When the opportunity comes to strike at Damascus, we will do it," Ezra, the minister for parliamentary relations, was quoted as saying at the weekly cabinet meeting."
Rantissi himself said following the assassination last month in a similar airstrike of Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, "I am the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, but Khaled Mashaal is the top leader of Hamas."
Mashaal for his part said he would like to see Hamas take its revenge for Yassin by targeting Sharon to claim an eye for an eye.
"It is normal the reply to the enemy be equal to the crime," Mashaal was quoted as saying by the London-based Arabic-language daily Al-Hayat on Wednesday.
Mashaal, 48, an imposing figure with dark skin and salt and pepper hair who wears a closely cropped beard and favours western-style suits, was one of the founding members of Hamas with Yassin in 1987 and made head of the political bureau nine years later.
He was born in a village near the West Bank town of Ramallah where his childhood was infused with stories of how his father took part in the resistance against the British mandate.
After the 1967 Middle East war, his family left for Kuwait, where he became involved in religious activism and obtained a degree in physics from Kuwait University in 1978.
He left for Jordan with his seven children - four boys and three girls - in 1990 when Kuwait expelled the Palestinians as punishment for their support of the Iraqi conquest.
Like all Hamas leaders, he has been - and clearly still is - in Israel's sights.
On September 25, 1997, agents from Israel's Mossad secret service bungled an attempt to assassinate him on a street in Amman by injecting him with poison.
He fell into a coma and a furious King Hussein demanded Israel hand over the antidote if it wanted the captured agents to be freed.
The episode compelled the Israeli prime minister at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu, to release Yassin from prison.
Mashaal is known particularly for his brilliant speeches and his iron logic in defending the Palestinian cause.
"You must understand, liberation of the territories from the occupation is only one phase ... We do not distinguish between Palestine of 1948 and Palestine of 1967. Palestine is everything," he said in an interview last year.
However, five years ago Jordanian authorities deported Mashaal and four other Hamas leaders amid allegations of illegal activities.
Mashaal now divides his time between Syria, Lebanon and the Gulf countries, but has rarely been seen in Damascus since the Hamas offices here were closed amid US pressure.
Hamas was founded in 1987, shortly after the beginning of the first intifada, or Palestinian uprising, against Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, from ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood organisation.
Since then, it has claimed responsibility for numerous suicide attacks against Israeli civilians. The group, in turn, has lost many members of its leadership in attacks by the Israeli military and security sweeps.
Hamas, an Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement, is on both the US State Department and European Union lists of terrorist organisations.
Mashallgetblowedup.
You'd never know it from reading newspaper headlines.
If the new leader is a leader indeed (and not just in name), then certainly Hamas members will know about it; and if Hamas members know about it, so does Mossad. Trust me. What a stupid, typically Arab solution. It's time to see the handwriting on the wall, Jabril.
I just love it. Israel is going to get Mashaal. And then, when Israel knocks off his anonymous (but known to Mossad) successor, how is Hamas going to protest the "assassination"?!
He'll just be another unknown, dead terrorist.
Well, isn't that convenient; he's about to be accommodated.
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