Word: ishtawi
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...brother later told me. "His fate was to die by the sea." The helicopter launched at least three Hellfire missiles as the four men in the car tried to flee. Afterward, there was little of Mohammed to bury besides his head. His real name, I learned, was Ahmed Ishtawi, a top commander in Hamas' clandestine military wing, dead...
...help run Hamas from increasingly constricted exile in Damascus, and the more pragmatic Ismail Haniya. But after them, Hamas is deliberately obscure. Almost no one knows the identities of the operational militants until they're caught or killed. Al-Qassam men don't show off; they don't swagger. Ishtawi's brother knew Ahmed was a militant, but his brother had no knowledge of Ahmed's stature or deadly exploits until he read the leaflet that boasted of them, published by Hamas after Ahmed's death...
Hamas is divided and subdivided into endless compartmentalized cells responsible for discrete tasks: recruitment, planning, weapons development, operations, security. Apart from a few top guns like Ishtawi, who was an overall operations commander and liaison to West Bank Hamas groups, cell members know nothing about units outside their own. In Gaza, when a cell is decapitated, fresh leaders are ready to spring into place. "Even if Sheik Yassin got killed," a Hamas activist told me last month, "Hamas is a big organization now and even he can be replaced. When a leader is killed, it makes us all tougher...
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