Confed999

Hamas Leader Killed in Israeli Strike
Apr 17, 4:31 PM (ET)

By IBRAHIM BARZAK

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - An Israeli missile strike killed Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi as he rode in his car Saturday evening, hospital officials said. Rantisi's son Mohammed and a bodyguard were also killed in the attack.

The militant Hamas leader was one of Israel's top targets after it assassinated Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin in an airstrike last month.

Rantisi's car was hit with missiles Saturday evening on the road outside his home, leaving only the burned, destroyed vehicle. After the explosion, Israeli helicopters were heard in the area.

Rantisi was taken to the hospital in critical condition, his body pocked with bloody wounds and blood streaming from his head and neck. He was taken to emergency surgery but died five minutes after arriving at the hospital.

Palestinian officials lashed the Israeli strike.

"We condemn in strongest possible terms this Israeli crime of assassinating Dr. Rantisi. This is state terror, and the Israeli government is fully responsible for the consequences of this action," Palestinian Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat said.

Witnesses said there were three people in the car at the time of the explosion. Five pedestrians were also wounded, hospital officials said.

The dead included Akram Nassar, 35, Rantisi's personal bodyguard and his son Mohammed, 27, hospital officials said. Rantisi's wife was in the car, but her condition and location was not known, hospital sources and Hamas said.

About 2,000 angry Palestinians marched through the streets carrying pieces of Rantisi's car shouting, "revenge, revenge."

Shooting was heard in the center of Gaza City and people were chanting Rantisi's name.

"This blood will not be wasted," said Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas leader at the hospital. "We are not going to give up."

Rantisi is Hamas' top leader in Gaza and one of the most hard-line members of the militant movement who rejects all compromise with Israel and calls for the destruction of the Jewish state.

Israel had previously tried to kill Rantisi June 10 when three Apache helicopters fired at least seven missiles toward Rantisi's car in a crowded Gaza thoroughfare, reducing his vehicle to a scorched heap of metal. Rantisi escaped with a wound to the right leg. Two Palestinian bystanders were killed.

In a retaliatory attack the next day, 16 Israelis were killed in a Hamas suicide bombing in Jerusalem.

Israeli officials justified the attack as part of the ongoing battle against militants who have killed more than 900 Israelis in attacks over the past 3 1/2 years of violence.

"We have to continue this war, every time and every place. And this story with Rantisi shows how the army can get everywhere. We have to continue, we have no other choice," Cabinet Minister Gideon Ezra told Israel Radio.

Israel has stepped up strikes on Hamas in advance of a proposed unilateral pullout from Gaza. Israeli officials have said they hope a string of military successes to show that the militant group was not driving it out of the coastal strip.

The explosion occurred Saturday night a block from Rantisi's house in the Sheik Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City, about 100 yards from where Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin was buried after Israel assassinated him last month.

Since then, Israel has vowed to kill the entire leadership of the Islamic militant organization.

Israeli sources said Saturday they struck at Rantisi at the first available opportunity and said he was planning a large attack on Israel to solidify his leadership of Hamas and to retaliate for Yassin's killing.

Israel has been on high alert for a suicide bombing since Yassin's March 22 killing. After Rantisi was killed, Israeli prisons holding Palestinian prisoners went on high-alert, fearing possible riots.

During the mourning period for Yassin, Rantisi was defiant about Israel's threats against him.

"We will all die one day. Nothing will change. If by Apache or by cardiac arrest, I prefer Apache," he said.

Original Story

__________________
No man is free until all men are free - John Hossack
I agree completely with this Administration’s goal of a regime change in Iraq-John Kerry
even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act-John Kerry
He may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States. It’s the miscalculation that poses the greatest threat-John Kerry

Confed999

Assassinated Hamas Leader Had High Profile
Apr 17, 4:32 PM (ET)

By MARK LAVIE

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) - Abdel Aziz Rantisi, the Hamas leader assassinated in an Israeli air strike Saturday, was one of the highest profile and most extreme voices of the violent Islamic group.

He served as Hamas leader in Gaza for less than a month after Israel killed his predecessor, Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin, in a similar helicopter missile strike on March 22.

Rantisi rejected any accommodation with Israel, following strict Hamas ideology that called for destruction of the Jewish state in the Middle East.

A pediatrician by profession with a reasonable command of English, Rantisi was readily available to foreign journalists and was one of the most recognizable of Hamas' leaders.

Even before he was chosen to replace Yassin, Rantisi was in Israeli gunsights. Last year, an Israeli helicopter fired missiles at his vehicle, wounding him.

Rantisi, 56, was undeterred by the Israeli attempts to kill him and seemed to predict his death.

"It's death whether by killing or by cancer; it's the same thing," he said the day after he was chosen Hamas leader in Gaza. "Nothing will change if it's an Apache (helicopter) or cardiac arrest. But I prefer to be killed by Apache."

Rantisi also told journalists that day, "My priority is to unite the Palestinians in the trenches of resistance because there is no one left who believes in something called the peace process."

Rantisi, Yassin and five other men founded Hamas in 1987 at the start of a first uprising against Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The group grew into one of the region's largest militant Islamic factions and called for a Muslim Middle East without a Jewish state.

In the early 1990s, at the start of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that Hamas opposed, the group pioneered suicide bombings in Israel. During the current conflict, which has lasted more than three years, the group has killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings and shooting attacks.

Rantisi was born on Oct. 23, 1947, in Yibnah, now the Israeli town of Yavneh. He was the fourth of 12 children. When he was 6 months old, his family fled the war that came with Israel's creation in 1948.

The family ended up in the Khan Younis refugee camp in southern Gaza. Rantisi moved to Gaza City during the first uprising.

After co-founding Hamas, Rantisi was the group's first leader to be captured and imprisoned by Israeli forces. Altogether, he spent seven years in prison.

During one confinement, he shared a cell with Yassin and committed to memory the Quran, the Muslim holy book of around 600 pages - an achievement he spoke of proudly.

In prison, he also once meticulously assembled a model of Jerusalem's Al Aqsa Mosque from empty cartons of milk, cigarettes and toothbrushes. He displayed the colorfully painted memento of his prison days on a table in his living room.

In 1992, after the killing of a soldier, Israel sent Rantisi and more than 400 other Islamic militants into temporary exile in southern Lebanon. There, Rantisi first became internationally known, using his command of English to become a spokesman for those deported.

Back in Gaza a year later, Rantisi, with a gray-flecked beard and gold-framed glasses, quickly became one of the group's most recognizable faces, serving as a Hamas spokesman, welcoming journalists to his apartment in Gaza City's Sheik Radwan neighborhood.

Rantisi was targeted by Israel's air force in June of last year. He leaped from his jeep as a helicopter missile pounded the vehicle. Six other missiles pulverized the jeep with thunderous bangs, killing Rantisi's bodyguard and a bystander and wounding his son Ahmed.

As he ran, Rantisi was hit in the leg by machine gun fire from the chopper.

Fellow Hamas founder and surgeon Mahmoud Zahar operated on Rantisi to repair damage to arteries in one of his legs. Recovering at Gaza's Shifa Hospital, Rantisi vowed Hamas would crush Israel: "I swear we will not leave one Jew in Palestine."

Original Story

Confed999

Ambassador: Hamas leader was 'doctor of death'

U.N. resolution would condemn 'extrajudicial executions'

UNITED NATIONS (CNN) -- The Israeli ambassador to the United Nations gave a spirited defense Monday of the weekend killing of Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi, calling him a "doctor of death" who did nothing to advance the Mideast peace process.

The speech by Israeli Ambassador Dan Gillerman came as the U.N. Security Council considered a resolution condemning Israel for the Saturday killing.

"He was a radical terrorist leader that joyfully and publicly celebrated the murder of innocent men, women and children, sought to destroy any peace initiative and called for the destruction of Israel by force of arms," Gillerman said.

"He believed that violence was the 'only option.' "

He added: "Rantisi was a trader in death, a doctor of death, and no one should be surprised that he paid the price for it."

Rantisi, who trained as a pediatrician, was killed in an Israeli helicopter attack on his car in Gaza City -- just four weeks after his predecessor, Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, was killed in a similar fashion. Isarel and the United States have labeled Hamas a terrorist organization.

Rantisi's killing sparked outrage in the Arab world, and tens of thousands of Palestinians took to the streets in protest.

The assassination came just days after President Bush endorsed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan under which Israel would unilaterally pull out of Gaza and parts of the West Bank, but would keep certain settlements in the West Bank. (Full story)

Bush's endorsement sparked anger from many Palestinians and other Arab leaders.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the killing of Rantisi was a breach of international law and called on Israel to end its assassinations.

"The only way to halt an escalation of violence is for Israelis and Palestinians to work towards a viable negotiating process aimed at a just, lasting and comprehensive settlement," Annan said.

A draft of the resolution before the Security Council condemns "the extrajudicial executions recently committed by Israel, the occupying power, as illegal, unjustified and counterproductive."

Palestinian anger
Nasser Al-Kidwa, the Palestinian observer to the United Nations, blasted Israel for its "belligerent occupation" of Gaza and the West Bank.

He said the Security Council must take action to "bring an end to the cycle of violence and bloodshed."

"The deliberate, excessive, disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force, including the extrajudicial executions, being carried out by Israel against the Palestinian civilian population constitutes a grave breach of international law," Al-Kidwa said.

He also said any parallels drawn between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the global war on terrorism is "inappropriate and completely erroneous."

"Israel's constant attempts to draw such parallels and to exploit the international fight against terrorism must be rejected," Al-Kidwa said.

Gillerman went on to say, "It is no good to affirm in theory Israel's right to defend itself in this conflict, but then in practice seek to deny us the right to specifically target those illegal combatants directly responsible."

Britain's deputy ambassador, Adam Thomson, said his nation shares the European Union's condemnation of the killing of Rantisi, and urged all parties to try to get the Mideast road map back on track.

The United States, which has veto power as one of the five permanent members of the council, indicated it has no plans to vote for the resolution.

Original Story

Ray

Here comes the King of Potomac,
Shooting pellets up the elephants doorway,
Sharon, had one big B,
Rantissi had two but small

(Sung to the tune of Colonel Bogey)

One more river
And thats the River of Jordan
One more River
And thats the river to cross.

__________________


"Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

HAKUNA MATATA

Jay

Ray Sahab,
Whats our policy on killings like these ?? why are we not actively involved in killing all the *****es from the west and east and waiting for their govts to act?? Can't RAW mount an operation like this??

__________________
A grain of wheat eclipsed the sun of Adam !!

ChrisF202

Whats RAW?

ZFBoxcar

RAW is India's special forces/intelligence.

Confed999

What?



Sin after sin I have endured
Yet the wounds I bear are the wounds of love

Frantic mindless zombies
Grab at fleeting time
Lost in cold perplexion
Waiting for the sign

Generations tremble
Clinging face to face
Helpless situation
To end the perfect race

Flashing senseless sabers
Cut us to the ground
Eager for the life blood
Of all who can be found

Save me, my heart's open wide
Help me, no question of pride
Save me, my people have died
Total genocide

Slice to the left, slice to the right
None to retaliate, none will fight
Chopping at the hearts, snuffing out the lives
This race departs, no one will survive
Heads to the feet, feet to the air
Souls in the soil, heavy in despair
End of all ends, body into dust
To greet death friends, extinction is a must

Jay

That's India's external intelligence agency (Research and Analysis wing)....

Ray

Confed,

A pretty good poem.

Very powerful.

Applicable to all.

Confed999

It's an excerpt of a song called Genocide by a leather clad, heavy metal band called Judas Priest. The part that allways got me is "none will fight", because I simply cannot see going without a fight.