Slain Rantisi targeted 'all Jews' but also offered '10-year truce'

The bearded doctor stared from behind his glasses and defendedanother mass killing in monotonous, slightly robotic tones.

"We are very clear, our enemy continues to kill our civilians sothey should not expect us to stop the martyrdom operations," saidAbdel Aziz Rantisi, then the chief spokesman for Hamas.

With a single bodyguard, he sat in the living room of his modesthome in Gaza City as tea was handed to his visitors. Barely 24 hoursearlier, one of Rantisi's followers had walked into a pool hall inthe Israeli town of Rishon LeZion.

The Hamas operative carried a suitcase packed with explosives andlaced with ball bearings to increase its destructive power. Sixteenpeople died in the resulting blast.

To adopt Rantisi's chosen euphemism, this attack was another"martyrdom operation," executed at the height of the Palestinianuprising in May 2002.

At that time, Israel had not begun killing Hamas leaders one byone and Rantisi took few precautions. He would receive any journalistin his home, where Quranic verses hung from the walls.

Few visitors were searched, and every passerby in the streets ofGaza seemed to know where he lived.

Once seated on Rantisi's sofa, a visitor would hear him expound onthe Palestinian cause. His answers, delivered in English that was farfrom fluent, would bear no relation to the questions.

After the Rishon LeZion bombing, he claimed that Hamas had strucka military target. "We always targeted soldiers. Sometimes they werewearing civilian uniform, but they were soldiers," he said. Two 60-year-old women were among the dead.

Rantisi's inscrutable demeanor and robotic answers meant that itwas almost impossible to discern his true feelings.

Rantisi, who trained as a pediatrician in the 1970s but neverpracticed, traded in hard-line rhetoric. When Israel made a bungledattempt to kill Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the late Hamas leader, lastSeptember, Rantisi said "all Jews" were his targets.

He was one of the seven founding members of Hamas in 1988. Later,Rantisi spent years in Israeli jails and was among 400 militantsconsidered dangerous enough to be deported to Lebanon in 1992.

He became the chief spokesman for this group of exiles and rose tothe highest levels of the Hamas leadership when he returned to Gazafive years later.

For all his extreme rhetoric, Rantisi was also a realist who onlythree months ago offered Israel a "10-year truce" if it pulled backto its 1967 borders.

He dropped hints that the destruction of the state of Israel couldbe left to future generations.

Daily Telegraph