The very thought of modern hi-tech missile-firing helicopter gunships destroying a quadriplegic old man in a wheelchair as he came out of the mosque after early morning prayers goes against every civilised norm. The cold-blooded assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas and the acknowledged spiritual leader of Palestinians and Arabs, has led to widespread condemnation of the act, not only in the Arab world, but by the European Union and the UK. Even the United States was jolted into reversing its earlier sangfroid in the day and admit to the killing being “deeply disturbing”. The Israeli aim to kill the man it believed authorised all Hamas terrorist attacks, has been to weaken the Hamas before its own withdrawal from the occupied territories. But what Israel has done by this single strike, at the very minimum, is to have killed the prospects of the peace process in the Middle East, or whatever that was left of it in the continuing bloodletting of the past three years. Sheikh Yassin, who opposed the existence of Israel in Palestinian lands, had adopted a more conciliatory note in recent years in his willingness to settle temporarily for an independent Palestinian state in the formerly occupied territories and leave the next generation to “liberate” the rest of the country. Terrorist organisations have the capacity to recover quickly as long as the ideological motivation remains strong. It is more than likely, therefore, that the assassination of Sheikh Yassin will increase the prospects of terrorist violence intensifying in the coming weeks. The motivations of Hamas to continue its suicidal attacks are likely to increase rather than decrease as envisaged by the Israeli government. Coming as it does within days of the Madrid massacre and its influence on the global power structure not to talk of changes in European politics, the assassination of the popular Islamic spiritual leader is likely to lead to disparate Islamic radical terrorist groups receiving another “cause” as a shot in the arm to carry on with an agenda of terror.
