section_path: Prime minister (1996–1999)/First term/Hamas and Hezbollah
section_name: Hamas and Hezbollah
paragraph_text: Hamas and Hezbollah
  
  The months leading up to the 1996 Israeli election were marred by a series of Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel. After the Shin Bet assassinated Hamas military leader Yahya Ayyash on 5 January 1996, Mohammed Deif, now commander of the Qassam Brigades, organized a mass-casualty bombing campaign inside Israel as retaliation, including the Dizengoff Center suicide bombing in Tel Aviv and the two Jaffa Road bus bombings in Jerusalem. These operations were, in their scale, scope and sophistication, different and larger than any attacks of the past, and it has been alleged that both Syria and Iran had helped in their planning and financing. According to a report, Syrian Minister of Defense Mustafa Tlass instructed Ghazi Kanaan, the commander of Syrian forces in Lebanon, to establish links between Hezbollah and Hamas fighters, who were then trained both in Lebanon and in Iran and participated in the retaliatory operations for the murder of Ayyash. According to Mike Kelly, Hamas operative Hassan Salameh, who planned three of the attacks, was trained in Iran. In 2000, families of American victims of the attacks filed a lawsuit against Tlass, Kanaan and Iranian Minister of Intelligence Ali Fallahian.
  
  According to Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, Deif's campaign of massive retaliation and the failure of Israeli intelligence services to prevent it, was one of the factors that led to the defeat of Prime Minister Shimon Peres and the Israeli Labor Party in the 1996 Israeli general election and the victory of the right-wing Likud party of Netanyahu, who opposed the Oslo peace process:
  
  The wave of terror in February and March 1996 was a case study in how suicide attacks could alter the course of history. At the beginning of February, Peres was up twenty points in the polls over his opposition, the conservative hawk Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu. By the middle of March, Netanyahu had closed the gap significantly, and Peres led by only five percentage points. On May 29, Netanyahu won by 1 percent of the vote. This was all due to the terror attacks, which Peres simply couldn't stop. Yahya Ayyash's disciples had ensured the right wing's victory and "derailed the peace process," in the words of the deputy head of the Shin Bet, Yisrael Hasson. Curiously enough, though, after the election, the attacks stopped for almost a year. Some said this was because of Arafat 's campaign against Hamas, and the arrest of many members of its military wing. Others believed that Hamas no longer had any reason to carry out suicide attacks, because Netanyahu had already almost completely stopped the peace process, which was the short-term goal of the attacks anyway.
  
  In 1997 Ali Fallahian, the iranian Intelligence Minister, authorized a new Hamas bombing campaign to further disrupt the peace process, and Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, then living in Amman, Jordan, picked Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, an expert bomb-maker in the West Bank, to construct the bombs, and sent five suicide bombers to detonate them simultaneously in Jerusalem on 30 July 1997 (Mahane Yehuda market bombings) and 4 September 1997 (Ben Yehuda street bombings)), killing 21 Israelis. According to Ronen Bergman based on internal IDF sources, Mashal's antidote only secured the release of the two Mossad Kidon agents that were carrying out the assassination attempt. At least six other Mossad agents involved in the operations were holed up in the Israeli embassy. King Hussein would only release them if Israel released Ahmed Yassin and a large number of other Palestinian prisoners. King Hussein needed the demands to be "enough to enable the king to be able to publicly defend the release of the hit team."
  
  On the same day that Hamas bombed the Ben Yehuda street in Jerusalem, Hezbollah executed a well-planned ambush on the IDF's naval special forces Shayetet 13 in Ansariya, South Lebanon, killing 12 Israeli commandos. On 25 May 1998, the remains of Itamar Ilyah as well as body parts of at least two other soldiers who died in the Ansariya ambush were exchanged for 65 Lebanese prisoners and the bodies of 40 Hizbullah fighters and Lebanese soldiers captured by Israel. Among those returned to Lebanon, were the remains of Hadi Nasrallah, the son of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in a clash with IDF a week after the Ansariya ambush. Netanyahu called it "one of the worst tragedies that has ever occurred to us".
  
  These major Israeli failures against Hamas and Hezbollah under Netanyahu's first premiership and their results in the subsequent releases of imprisoned Palestinian and Lebanese leaders from Israeli jails are thought to have dealt a blow to Netanyahu's rhetoric of a "tough stance" towards enemies of Israel, and to have played a role in his defeat in the 1999 Israeli general election.