Whenever Sheik Ahmed Yassin was asked if he feared assassination at Israel's hands -- an often-posed query in his final months, as one lieutenant after another was targeted for fiery death by Israeli helicopter gunships -- the white-scarved cleric would fix his questioner with a piercing gaze while a half-smile played across his waxy features.
"All my life," he would declare in his high-pitched voice, "I have dreamed of martyrdom." In killing the spiritual leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas, Israel may have granted him his greatest wish -- and made him the ultimate symbol of the violently self-immolating ideology he propounded.
Even before the outbreak of the Palestinians' 42-month-old intifada, or uprising, Hamas was at the forefront of the campaign of suicide bombings that has haunted Israeli cities and towns. With grim regularity, members of its military wing, the Izzidin al-Qassam, murmured their final prayers, strapped on explosives belts and blew themselves up in crowded cafes and buses.
The frail and ailing Yassin, although himself the picture of physical powerlessness, probably did more than any other figure to sear into the consciousness of these young Palestinians the notion that a death sought in order to inflict a bloody blow upon a hated enemy was a glorious one.
That stature is a double-edged sword for Israel -- on the one hand, Yassin is held in such high regard by ordinary Palestinians that a strike at him is incendiary. On the other hand, leaving him free to preach his message of holy war against the Jewish state is regarded by many in the Israeli security establishment as equally dangerous.
The strike at Yassin was not completely unexpected. Following a double suicide bombing last week at the Israeli port of Ashdod that killed 10 port workers -- the conflict's first successful Palestinian strike at a major piece of Israeli infrastructure -- the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had reportedly decided to renew the targeting of senior leaders of Palestinian militant groups, a policy it had quietly put on hold.
In the already chaotic Gaza Strip, the level of violence has been steadily rising in recent weeks. Sharon has unveiled an initiative to uproot Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, and Israel, loath to let it appear that it is being driven out of the seaside territory, has staged a sharp series of military incursions in crowded refugee camps and in Gaza City itself. Hamas and the other Palestinian militant groups, already crowing at what they portray as a crushing defeat for Israel, have recently cemented alliances among themselves, carrying out a string of attacks in concert.
