Hisham Abu Taha, Arab News

GAZA, 23 March 2004 — Israel assassinated Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin yesterday, provoking global condemnation and cries of revenge from Palestinian resistance.

Israeli security sources said Prime Minister Ariel Sharon personally ordered and monitored the helicopter attack on the 67-year-old symbol of Palestinian resistance, whose wheelchair lay smashed in a pool of blood after three missiles exploded outside the Gaza mosque he had left minutes earlier after the Fajr prayer.

“The state of Israel this morning hit the leader of the Palestinian assassins and terrorists,” Sharon said in a brief address to deputies from his Likud party as he congratulated his armed forces on the operation.

At least seven other people died in the missile strike and two of Yassin’s sons were among the 15 wounded.

Salah Amudi, 30, said he and a first-aid nurse had picked up Yassin’s remains from the ground and took them to Al-Shifa Hospital in plastic bags.

“I was also at the mosque praying. Upon leaving, I heard a first missile, then a second and third,” he said, still shaken. “It was ugly, we didn’t know what to do. We thought they (the Israeli Army) would strike again.”

Yassin’s head was cut in two by the blast and part of his brain had fallen out.

The occupied territories erupted in anger following the announcement of Yassin’s death, with groups of Palestinians spontaneously taking to the streets to call for swift reprisals. Israeli forces killed four Palestinians, including an 11-year-old.

The United States strongly denied any involvement in the assassination but said the Jewish state had the right to defend itself against the “terrorist” group.

Speaking on morning television interviews, White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the United States did not have advance warning of the assassination.

“It is very important that everyone step back now and try to be calm in the region,” Rice told NBC’s “Today” show.

But Rice made it clear on whose side Washington is. “Let’s remember that Hamas is a terrorist organization and that Sheikh Yassin himself has been heavily involved in terrorism,” she said.

At noon, a sea of wailing Gazans took part in the funeral procession for a man seen by many as a patriarch, in the largest march the strip had seen since the start of the Palestinian uprising. The procession left the hospital and went to Yassin’s modest Gaza house before attending a service at a mosque and finally burying him in the city’s “martyrs’ cemetery”.

Top Hamas official Abdel Aziz Al-Rantisi said: “Yassin was a man in a nation, and a nation in a man. And the retaliation of this nation will be of the size of this man. You will see deeds not words.”

A website published a statement purporting to come from an Al-Qaeda-linked group vowing revenge on the United States and its allies over Yassin’s murder. “We tell Palestinians that Sheikh Yassin’s blood was not spilt in vain and call on all legions of Abu Hafs Al-Masri Brigades to avenge him by attacking the tyrant of the age, America, and its allies,” said the statement by the group carried by the Al-Ansar forum website.

Hours after Yassin’s murder, an Arab stabbed and wounded three passengers on an Israeli bus in Jaffa before fleeing, a police spokeswoman said. Earlier, an ax-wielding Palestinian wounded three people outside an army base near Tel Aviv.

In northern Israel, Lebanon’s Hezbollah attacked Israeli posts in a disputed border area, drawing air raids. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

The European Union criticized the “extra-judicial killing” but also recalled past EU condemnations of bombings.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Israel had the right to defend itself against terrorism. “But it is not entitled to go for this kind of unlawful killing and we therefore condemn it,” he said.

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana condemned the killing as “very, very bad news” for the Middle East peace process.