ISRAEL

Guardian: Restraint is dead, warns Hamas

Assassination in Gaza sparks threats against Israeli cabinet

Hamas has accused Israel of launching a strategy to assassinate Palestinian leaders who oppose Ariel Sharon's plans to impose an emasculated form of independence on the occupied territories.
The militant Islamist organisation described the Israeli helicopter rocket attack that killed one of its co-founders, Ibrahim Makadme, in Gaza on Saturday as a marked shift towards the targeting of its political leaders. Hamas said it would retaliate directly against Mr Sharon, his cabinet and government officials.

"This opens new doors," said Mahmoud Zahar, a senior leader of Hamas's political wing. "All Israeli officials have fixed addresses. We will hit them in their homes, offices, cars. We are going to respond according to the proverb: an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose."

The two sides have maintained an informal but unacknowledged agreement through most of the past two years of intifada in which the Israelis did not touch the Hamas political leadership and Hamas limited its attacks on Israeli civilians inside the 1967 borders. Yasser Arafat and the Egyptian government pressed Hamas without success to formalise the arrangement as a "ceasefire".

Abu Sabbah said that following the killing, the Hamas leadership had not so much switched policy with its threat to target Mr Sharon and other government officials as lifted the restraints.

"Hamas didn't change its policy. The military wing has always put on the table that we should target Sharon and his terrorist cabinet but the political leadership demanded restraint. From today the military wing has a free hand. We can go after who we like," he said.