Word: salim
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About seven weeks ago, an Israeli helicopter flew into the West Bank town of Nablus, targeting two leaders of the Palestinian terrorist organization known as Hamas. The two men, Jamal Mansour and Jamal Salim, were instantly killed. Four other men in the Hamas offices and two young boys standing outside were also fatally wounded when the choppers fired...
...Last week Jamal Salim was decapitated by an Israeli missile while visiting a Hamas office in Nablus. The prominent preacher and political leader was also, according to Israeli officials, a key member of a Hamas network preparing a massive terror campaign against Israeli cities. Jamal Salim's story is a parable of the mounting violence and fatalism that have engulfed Palestinians, the tale of an admitted hard-liner with a thoughtful side who ended up consumed by a cause that has swung beyond politics into the realm of blood feud...
...Salim's family were refugees from a village near Acre; he grew up in the dusty Ain refugee camp on the edge of Nablus. Arrested by Israel for the first time in 1975, he was jailed seven times in all and deported for a year to Lebanon. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat jailed him twice more during the times that Hamas radicals were subject to frequent roundups. For the last four years of his life, Salim, a popular teacher of religion at an Islamic school, never left Nablus. Colleagues on the National and Islamic Committee, a collection of Palestinian factions that...
Opinions like that get noticed. Last month Israel asked Arafat to arrest a group of Palestinians it accused of terrorist activity. Salim was among them. Two weeks ago, he was in the mourning tent for Salah Darwazeh, a Hamas activist killed by an Israeli missile. Salim watched as his colleague in the Hamas leadership, Sheik Jamal Mansour, addressed the mourners. "This week you are seeing images of the martyrdom of Darwazeh!" the sheik yelled into the microphone. "Next week you might see my martyrdom." The only Hamas leader in the West Bank with more influence than Salim, Mansour died...
Arafat's Palestinian Authority tried to take some of the edge off the anger. With good reason. Much of the rage was aimed at Arafat's police for failing to protect Salim and Mansour. Within hours of the attack, Arafat's security court sentenced three men to death for allegedly collaborating with Israel. The judicial process was not much less swift or more formal than actions on the streets of West Bank towns; in the three days after the Israeli attack, lynch mobs murdered four other suspected collaborators. Hamas vowed it would take revenge. This terrible summer, the number...