Word: gaza
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...Israeli-Palestinian conflict was rocked by literal and metaphorical explosions last week. On Saturday night an Israeli missile struck a car carrying Abdel Aziz Rantisi, the vitriolic leader in Gaza of the militant Palestinian group Hamas. Rantisi, a pediatrician who helped found the group in the 1980s, was killed along with a bodyguard and one other companion...
...Sharon had ordered the strike to bolster his standing with rightist supporters. But an Israeli military spokesman countered that Rantisi had been "directly responsible for the deaths of scores of Israelis." The assassination came just hours after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed himself and an Israeli guard at a Gaza border crossing. Hamas was one of two groups that claimed responsibility...
...life," Rantisi said then. "If it is by an Apache [helicopter] or by cardiac arrest, I prefer that it will be by Apache." Indeed, Shin Bet, the Israeli intelligence service, had long tracked Rantisi--he survived a rocket attack last year--and Saturday night, when he drove on a Gaza street without the usual buffering entourage of civilians, the Israelis seized the opportunity...
...significant challenge to Arafat's leadership in Palestinian ranks comes from the Islamist radicals of Hamas and the rank-and-file of his own nationalist Fatah movement, which increasingly shares the Islamists' belief in the path of confrontation. Hence Sharon's recent remarks to an Israeli interviewer on his Gaza plan: "The Palestinians understand that this plan is, to a great extent, the end of their dreams, a very heavy blow to them," which, he said would "force them to give up their aspirations for many years to come, until a new leadership emerges on their side that is ready...
...have outlived itself. Sharon has no intention of negotiating a settlement with the PA leadership. The PA's decline has been accompanied by the growing preeminence of Hamas and likeminded elements in Fatah, and it is that alliance that looks most likely to fill the political vacuum in Gaza once the Israelis withdraw. It is the prospect of the green and white banners of Hamas being hoisted over the vacated settlements of Gaza that has the hawkish faction of Sharon's own Likud party warning that withdrawal will be claimed by Palestinians as a victory for terrorism, and that like...