Agencies  --  Arab News

GAZA CITY, 19 April 2004 — Hamas secretly appointed a new Gaza Strip chief early yesterday, but refused to reveal his identity after Israel assassinated two Hamas leaders in less than a month.

Israel assassinated Hamas leader Abdelaziz Al-Rantissi in a missile strike on his car on Saturday, part of its declared campaign to wipe out the group’s leadership ahead of a planned Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Two of Rantissi’s bodyguards were also killed in the attack.

Hamas posted a statement on its website pledging “100 unique retaliations” that will shake Israel. It said it had declared a state of emergency in the West Bank and Gaza Strip until revenge was complete.

“Yesterday they said that they killed Rantissi to weaken Hamas. They are dreaming. Every time a martyr falls, Hamas is strengthened,” Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas leader, told more than 70,000 mourners gathered at the city’s largest mosque for the funeral. “Hamas might have a crisis at hand after losing its leaders, but it will not be defeated.”

Rantissi was killed less than a month after Israel assassinated Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. The group’s Damascus-based leader Khaled Meshaal reportedly instructed the group to keep the name of its new Gaza leader secret.

Israel has targeted Hamas and its leaders in advance of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s proposed withdrawal from all of the Gaza Strip and a few West Bank settlements.

Sharon returned from Washington Friday with strong US backing for his plan, as well as unprecedented US support for Israel to hold on to parts of the West Bank under a final peace deal.

Sharon has called for a May 2 referendum on his plan in his hard-line Likud Party, and polls show the proposal garnering a slim majority of the party’s 200,000 voters.

Israeli Cabinet Minister Gideon Ezra said Meshaal was also marked for death.

“The fate of Khaled Meshaal is the fate of Rantissi. The minute we have the operational opportunity we will do this,” Ezra said.

Meshaal favors a military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Meshaal, head of Hamas’ political bureau, said after Rantissi’s assassination Saturday that Sharon was seeking to “eliminate” Hamas, while insisting that the group “will not stop .... as this is the price of liberation.”

“Select a leader for the movement in Gaza to replace our brother, martyr and fighter Abdelaziz Rantissi, but do not disclose his name,” Meshaal also said in an interview with the Qatar-based Arab satellite television Al-Jazeera.

Hamas said yesterday that it had done just that, citing Meshaal’s suggestion as an indication of his influence.

Rantissi had said following the assassination last month of Sheikh Yassin, “I am the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, but Khaled Meshaal is the top leader of Hamas.”

Meshaal for his part said he would like to see Hamas take its revenge for Yassin by targeting Sharon to claim an eye for an eye.

“It is normal the reply to the enemy be equal to the crime,” Meshaal was quoted as saying by the London-based Arabic-language daily Al-Hayat Wednesday.

Meshaal, 48, an imposing figure with dark skin and salt and pepper hair who wears a closely cropped beard and favors western-style suits, was one of the founding members of Hamas with Yassin in 1987 and made head of the political bureau nine years later.

He was born in a village near the West Bank town of Ramallah where his childhood was infused with stories of how his father took part in the resistance against the British mandate.

After the 1967 Middle East war, his family left for Kuwait, where he became involved in religious activism and obtained a degree in physics from Kuwait University in 1978.

He left for Jordan with his seven children — four boys and three girls — in 1990.

Meshaal is known particularly for his brilliant speeches and his iron logic in defending the Palestinian cause.