Hamas' Yassin led Israel's most potent foe

GAZA - Sheikh Ahmed Yassin spoke in a whisper from his wheelchair but the spiritual leader of Hamas led the most potent Palestinian grassroots movement against Israel until his death in an Israeli air strike on Monday.

The 67-year-old cleric co-founded his Islamic militant group in 1987 with the goal of not just ending Israeli occupation in the Gaza Strip and West Bank but also destroying the Jewish state.

"Palestine lost her spiritual father," said Khaled Abdu, one Gazan among an endless stream of mourners. "We lost a great hero and an irreplaceable leader".

Palestinians said Yassin, paralysed as a child in a sports accident, was the mastermind behind Hamas and its network of militants and Islamic charities. He espoused "armed struggle" and suicide bombings to end the occupation.

He turned Hamas from a fringe group that challenged the power base of the mainstream Palestinian Liberation Organisation into its biggest rival. About 30 per cent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza pledged allegiance to the Islamic movement.

He became Gaza's most charismatic and influential figure by heading a movement that ran a broad welfare network which drew support for Hamas at the expense of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, seen by many Palestinians as corrupt and incompetent.

In late 2003 Yassin signalled readiness in principle for a truce. But Israel dismissed the gesture as ridiculous and kept in place its designation of Yassin as "marked for death" after a decade of suicide attacks that killed hundreds of Israelis.

His group's appeal grew among Palestinians disillusioned with peace efforts and radicalised by harsh Israeli measures.

Interviewed in 2002, Yassin defended his group's years of suicide attacks on Israel, telling Reuters: "The Palestinian people are forced to defend themselves.

"The Palestinian people do not have Apache helicopters or F-16 fighter-bombers or tanks or missiles. The only thing they can have is themselves to die as martyrs," he said.

Yassin was slightly wounded in an Israeli assassination attempt on September 6, 2003, as he left a building where Hamas leaders had been meeting seconds before an electronically guided Israeli bomb blew it apart.

"He had been marked for death for a long time...Yassin and the others were behind the terror framework in the Gaza Strip," Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Zeev Boim said on Monday.

He was born near what is now the Israeli town of Ashkelon but he became a refugee in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and moved to Gaza.

Yassin joined the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic movement dedicated to the spread of Islam, while a student in Egypt. In 1987, he became the spiritual leader of Hamas, the Brotherhood's Palestinian military wing, sworn to Israel's destruction.

In 1991, Yassin was sentenced to life in prison for the kidnapping and killing of two Israeli soldiers.

He received a hero's welcome in Gaza six years later when Israel freed him to make amends to Jordan's King Hussein after a failed attempt to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Mashal in Amman strained relations between Israel and Jordan.

Yassin spearheaded Hamas opposition to interim peace deals signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation starting in 1993. Hamas carried out a string of suicide bombings after the deals were signed in an attempt to derail the accords.

Yassin's killing was the highest-profile assassination of a Palestinian since the April 1988 killing in Tunis of Palestinian commando chief Khalil al-Wazir.

Last week he told Reuters: "When a Hamas leader is killed, a hundred other leaders arise."

- REUTERS