The surprise about Israel's assassination of a Hamas leader in Damascus was not that it happened -- but that it provoked such little protest, writes Graham Usher in Jerusalem On Sunday 26 September Israel turned another page in its long war against Hamas and those who "harbour" them. In Damascus's Zahara district a car bomb killed Izzuddin Al-Sheikh Khalil, a middle-ranking leader in Hamas whom Israel expelled from his home in Gaza in December 1991. There were no official Israeli acknowledgements but plenty of unofficial ones, attributed to anonymous security sources, who implied that Khalil was somehow connected to the Hamas suicide bombings that killed 16 Israelis in Beersheva on 31 August. "I can't confirm or deny [Israel's responsibility for the killing] but I am not sorry it happened," said Israel's public security minister, Gideon Ezra, on Sunday. There is nothing new in Israel assassinating Palestinians in foreign lands. In 1995 Mossad gunned down Islamic Jihad leader, Fathi Shikaki, in Malta. In 1997 it tried to kill Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal, in Amman. Nor -- now -- it is unusual for Israel to strike deep into Syria: witness the bombing of an abandoned military camp near Damascus last year or the aerial "buzzing" of President Bashar Al-Assad's family home in Latakia. What is new is the immunity with which Israel feels free to act. The attempted assassination of Meshal triggered international outrage, the worst crisis in Israeli- Jordan relations since their 1994 peace treaty and an Israeli payback that involved the release of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin from prison. Those days -- that era -- is over. The most the US State Department would say is that were Israel behind the car bombing, it would have "preferred" Israel to take action against Hamas rather than do so itself. In any case: "The Syrian government must take steps to halt the activities of states, individuals and organisations operating on and from Syrian territory and in Lebanon that facilitate and direct violence and terror," said the US spokesman. The attack also underscored Syrian powerlessness, presumably one of the motives behind it. In an address to the UN General Assembly on 27 September Syrian foreign minister, Farouk Al-Sharaa, accused Israel of "inciting Americans, first, and then the West, to wage endless wars in the Middle East to underscore [its view] that the Arab- Israeli conflict is not the core of the problems in the region". But he tellingly failed to mention the Israeli inspired assassination that had just occurred in his capital. Sharaa's reticence is understandable. To threaten revenge would be to confirm America's charge that Syria is actively supporting "terrorism", since all military retaliation against Israel is now defined in these terms. But to admit that Syria can do nothing against Israel except mount diplomatic protest is to undermine a regime and an ethos that still prides itself on Arab steadfastness. Syria's present response to this noose is to evade it: saying nothing at the UN while requesting Hamas leaders to leave its capital. Hamas's freedom of action is only slightly wider. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, its military wing, Izzuddin Al-Qassam, warned: "we have allowed thousands of Zionists to travel and move in capitals around the world in order not to be the party that shifts the struggle overseas. But the Zionist enemy has done so and should bear the consequences of its actions," implying that Hamas may now extend the arena of its operations no less than Israel. But the political leadership swiftly brought the military ones to heel. "Our policy was and remains to conduct our struggle inside the Zionist entity," said Osama Hamdan, a Hamas spokesman in Lebanon. A Hamas source in Gaza was even more realist. "We have three constant policies: resisting the occupation; dialogue with the PA and Palestinian factions; and confining the struggle to Palestine. These won't change," he said. What hasn't changed either is Israel's military rule in the occupied territories. Israel commemorated the fourth anniversary of the Palestinian Intifada the same way as it started it, by killing seven Palestinians in occupied territories. Only the methods have changed. On Monday the Israeli army in Gaza killed one member of the Popular Resistance Committees through a missile strike and two other Palestinians by machine gun fire while allegedly planting a bomb on the Gaza border. A 55-year old civilian was also shot dead as he stood outside a school in Khan Yunis. The army said it had no knowledge of the killing. Palestinians said the fire emanated from army snipers in the Gush Qatif settlement. Two more Palestinians -- members of Al- Aqsa Martyrs Brigades -- were shot dead by the army during clashes in Nablus's Balata refugee camp. But the most ominous killing was the seventh. On a dirt road near Nablus "a tall, bearded, brown-haired settler" shot dead Sael Jabara, a Palestinian taxi driver. The settler said he was acting in self-defence, a claim that was enough for an Israeli court to release him from police custody. Palestinian passengers said the killing was entirely unprovoked, with the settler shooting Jabara in the arm and chest at point plank range. Yehosha Elitzur, the settler, comes from Itamar, one of four messianic settlements that flank Nablus. During the Intifada, settlers from these areas have killed many Palestinians, all of them civilians, all of them unprovoked. It may be this last murder was a continuation of that history. It may also be evidence of settlers seeing attacks on Palestinians as another weapon in their armory to thwart Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan . Whatever the motive the court's judgement on him means "it is possible to kill a Palestinian and then go home to rest," said Palestinian Knesset member Ahmed Tibi. It is a judgement that would appear to apply also to Israeli government -- even when it kills Palestinians by extra-judicial execution in another people's country.
