Collateral Damage

In the wake of an international outcry over the 15 Palestinian civilians Israel killed in the process of assassinating senior Hamas leader Sheik Salah Shehadah last week, Israeli leaders said they wouldn't have dropped the one-ton bomb on his Gaza hideout if they had known the result in advance. But given Shehadah's recent achievements, it is clear why Israeli security officials wanted him gone. Palestinian officials and Israeli security sources tell Time the 49-year-old Gazan had transformed Hamas' terror operations over the past year. From Gaza, Shehadah used e-mail and cell-phone text messages to rebuild West Bank terror cells destroyed by the Israeli operations. According to Israeli intelligence officials, Shehadah recently smuggled about half a dozen highly skilled bombmakers from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank to replace men arrested or killed in recent Israeli sweeps there. These "masters," as Israeli intelligence calls them, brought with them new, improved explosives formulas, which use levels of urea higher than in previous recipes to create a bomb that's more stable and more powerful. Shehadah also organized the manufacture of mortars and of Hamas' Qassem II rockets and exported the know-how from Gaza to the West Bank, according to Israeli security officials. But he may prove an even more lethal force in death. In the days before his assassination, relatively moderate Hamas leaders in Gaza were secretly talking to senior officials in Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. Palestinian officials close to Arafat say the Palestinian leader wanted to calm the violence because he felt it was undermining his global stature. The Hamas leaders were considering a brief truce, but the rage caused by the death of Shehadah and the civilians around him ended that prospect. Hamas will struggle to find an organizer as good as Shehadah. But his immediate legacy remains the network he built in the West Bank, and it is primed to take an awful revenge on Israelis.