OCCUPIED TERRITORIES

Guardian: You can't make a deal with the dead

Killing or banning Hamas and its leaders will do nothing for peace

For a walking dead man, Hamas leader Ismail Abu Shanab was unimpressed by the assassins who would one day come for him. "I am not afraid," he said as we sat drinking tea in his Gaza City home. "If the Israelis want to kill me, they will. We live in war, but the Palestinians are tough enough to confront the huge power facing them. We are not afraid to die."
In terms of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, Shanab was a pragmatist, credited with having helped to broker the seven-week Palestinian ceasefire. His conversation was peppered with hints that Hamas' rejectionism towards the state of Israel was tradable for withdrawal to the 1967 borders.

Shanab met his predicted end under a hail of Israeli rocket fire two weeks ago in Gaza City. His death was the 138th "targeted killing" of Palestinian militants by the Israeli military since 2000. Since Shanab's immolation, Israel has stepped up the killing game against Hamas, culminating in the failed strike against the paraplegic spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Yassin, last weekend. The total is now around 150 and rising.

But then so is the overall casualty count: 2,600 Palestinians and 840 Israelis. Hamas appears undeterred by the attrition campaign against its leadership. The materials for suicide vest bombs come cheap, around £30, and there is an endless army of Palestinian volunteers to wear them. In classic counter-insurgency warfare terms, the Israeli level of casualties, one in four, remains unsustainably high.

And as the lessons of Ireland show, Israel's counter-terrorist strategy against Hamas's political leadership is pointless and counter-productive. Like many ageing warriors, Ariel Sharon is caught up in an old war; he is re-enacting his own 1970s colonial-style pacification of Gaza and, as he notes proudly in his autobiography, the "killing of 104 terrorists" in seven months