Hamas blames Israel for assassination of top militant

Brother claims dead commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was strangled and electrocuted
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a senior Hamas military commander, was killed in his hotel room. Photograph: HO/Reuters

The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas has claimed that Israeli agents assassinated one of its senior military commanders in Dubai.

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, 49, was killed on 20 January in his hotel room a day after arriving in Dubai, according to Izzat ­al-Rishq, a Hamas official based in the ­Syrian capital, Damascus.

One account from Mabhouh's brother suggested he had been strangled and electrocuted. Another version said he had been poisoned.

Mabhouh, a Palestinian from Gaza, was a commander in the Hamas military wing wanted for the killing of two Israeli soldiers in 1989. Since then he had been living in Damascus, where several other senior Hamas leaders are in exile. He had been jailed previously in Israel and his house in Gaza was razed by the Israeli military.

Israeli officials did not comment on the claims that Mabhouh had been assassinated. Even if the claim is accurate the Israeli government rarely admits carrying out such operations abroad. However, Israel has killed dozens of Hamas political and military leaders.

Rishq, a member of the Hamas political bureau, gave no details of how Mabhouh died. "I cannot reveal the circumstances. We are working with the authorities in the United Arab Emirates," he told reporters.

Mabhouh's brother, Fayek al-Mabhouh, told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz that doctors believed he had died after a massive electric shock to the head. There were also signs of strangling.

A postmortem was held and blood samples were sent to France for further testing.

Fayek al-Mabhouh said his brother did not travel with bodyguards despite his position in the Hamas military wing. He claimed Mabhouh had survived previous assassination attempts. "Some six months ago he was poisoned," he was quoted as saying. "He was unconscious for 36 hours."

Another Palestinian source, quoted by Reuters, said Mabhouh could have been poisoned and that his body was found in his hotel room but with no apparent injuries. His door was blocked on the inside by chairs.

"It seems that an autopsy was ordered and found traces of poison in his body. Mabhouh was also ill. Hamas controls the information on this," the source said. "Being in Syria, Mabhouh was not directly involved in Hamas's military operations. He was one of their main military guys, although not a crucial figure."

In Dubai, police said the killing was the work of a "criminal gang" that had tracked Mabhouh since he arrived in the United Arab Emirates. It said most of the suspects had European passports and had already left the country.

At Mabhouh's funeral, near Damascus, the Hamas leader Khalid Meshal blamed Israel for the killing, promising revenge and declaring an "open war".

Israel has long tried to undermine and weaken Hamas, particularly since the group won Palestinian parliamentary elections four years ago and then seized full security control in Gaza a year later.

Israel has declared Gaza a "hostile entity" and imposed a tight economic blockade. It launched a devastating three-week war in Gaza a year ago that killed 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. But Hamas continues to survive as a political and military force.

"We in Hamas hold the Zionist enemy responsible for the criminal assassination of our brother, and we pledge to God and to the blood of the martyrs and to our people to continue his path of jihad and martyrdom," Hamas said in a statement on one of its websites. It threatened to "retaliate for this Zionist crime at the appropriate time and place".

According to Rishq, Mabhouh was involved in two separate incidents in 1989 at the height of the first intifada, or Palestinian uprising, in which two Israeli soldiers were killed. Avi Sasportas, a sergeant, was captured while hitch-hiking in Israel in February that year and was shot dead. In May of the same year Ilan Sa'don, a corporal, was captured and killed; his body was found in 1996.

The killings have been seen as important moments in Hamas's history: it was the first time the movement was directly identified in an attack on Israeli military targets and it triggered an Israeli crackdown.

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, was convicted of ordering the killings and later that year the Hamas organisation was outlawed.

In 1997 agents from the Israeli foreign intelligence service, Mossad, tried but failed to kill Meshaal by injecting poison into his ear in Amman, Jordan. The operation, which took place when Israel's leader, Binyamin Netanayhu, was first prime minister, was a spectacular failure for Israel. The agents were captured and only released after Israel freed Yassin from jail.

Yassin was assassinated in Gaza in 2004. His replacement, Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, was assassinated a month later.

Israeli agents have been accused of killing Imad Mughniyah, a senior figure in the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, who died in a car bombing in Damascus in February 2008. Israel has never publicly admitted involvement in his death.

Last month two other Hamas members were killed in a bomb blast in the southern suburbs of Beirut, in an area largely controlled by Hezbollah.

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