Hama's Past Explored In Analyzing Present Crisis In Israel

Only weeks after Israel publicly threatened to take its war with the Islamic militant group Hamas onto Syrian soil, a Hamas official in Damascus was killed Sunday when a powerful explosion tore through his sport utility vehicle.

Israeli officials disavowed knowledge of the blast that killed 42-year-old Izzedine Sheik Khalil, who had lived in the Syrian capital for the last 13 years and was reportedly a member of the group's military wing.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government expressed satisfaction over the death, and some news reports here cited security sources as indicating that Israel was responsible.

If so, it would be Israel's first known assassination of a Hamas operative outside the West Bank and Gaza Strip, though it has on rare occasions struck at prominent Palestinian militant leaders on foreign soil.

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In its nearly two decades of existence, Hamas has always ruled out widening its war on Israel to the outside world."Our struggle is here," Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas spiritual leader whom Israel assassinated in March, often said.

Hamas spokesmen, though, made thinly veiled appeals to other groups to act to avenge the death of Khalil.

"Our conflict arena is still the Palestinian area," said Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza. But he added:"We are confident that our Arab and Islamic nation will not stand by with hands tied."

Over the last 18 months, Israeli assassinations have decimated the leadership ranks of Hamas in Gaza, and driven the survivors deep underground -- which has had the perhaps unintended effect of shifting the balance of power toward the group's principal leadership in exile, in Damascus.

Syria has provided a haven for Palestinian radical groups since the 1960s, but Israel has almost never sought to pursue them there. Last October, Israeli warplanes bombed what Israel described as a base of the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad outside Damascus, the deepest airstrike in Syrian territory in more than two decades.

At the time, Islamic Jihad had just claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in the Israeli port city of Haifa that killed 19 people in a crowded restaurant.

Syrian officials urged President Bush to condemn Sunday's attack.

"This may not be a threat to Syria's national security, but it's a grave act of aggression and terrorism," said George Jabbour, a Syrian lawmaker.

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Israel has conducted other operations against militants outside its borders, mostly in the 1970s and '80s. Its Mossad spy agency tracked down and killed most of the Palestinians responsible for slaying 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. One of them, Ali Hassan Salameh, an aide to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, died in a 1979 Beirut car bombing.

In 1988, Arafat's chief deputy, Khalil Wazir, was slain by Israeli commandos in Tunisia. And in 1995, Islamic Jihad leader Fathi Shikaki was shot to death in Malta. Israel was widely blamed for the killing but never admitted carrying it out.

In Gaza City on Sunday, mourners flocked to Izzedine Sheik Khalil's family home in the run-down Sajaiya district. Koranic verses blared from loudspeakers in the traditional mourning tent.

Khalil was one of a group of Hamas activists expelled by Israel to south Lebanon in late 1990. Most were eventually allowed to come home, but he settled in Damascus.

Israeli officials said Khalil was a onetime mentor to Yehiya Ayash, known as"The Engineer," who was one of Hamas' most lethal bomb makers. Ayash was assassinated in 1996 in Gaza with a booby-trapped mobile phone, a killing widely attributed to Israel, but which Israel never publicly acknowledged.