DESCRIBED by Israel as the Gaza Strip’s “most brilliant and brutal terrorist,” the bearded Shehadeh, 48, was the leader of Hamas’ military wing, Izzadineal-Qassem, the group that has carried out the largest number of suicide attacks, including the deadliest ones, in the current Palestinian uprising.Israeli security sources described Shehadeh as deeply religious, a fervent supporter of suicide bombings and said he had been a possible successor to Hamas’ spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin.He directly commanded the top Hamas militants, drafted the group’s attack policies against Israel and upgraded Hamas fighting capability by introducing locally produced mortars, which have been fired at Israeli settlements, so far with little effect.Shehadeh “was really the most brutal and brilliant terrorist operating in the Gaza Strip,” Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Daniel Taub said. “He was personally responsible for orchestrating attacks against hundreds of civilians over the past two years.”From a star pupil to a leader Shehadeh was born in Gaza in 1953 to parents who fled the Arab town of Jaffa, today part of Tel Aviv, during the 1948 Mid East War that broke out at Israel’s independence.Israeli military intelligence described him as a star pupil at the high school in Gaza City’s Beach Refugee Camp, which he attended before going on to study social work in Alexandria, Egypt.After his return to Gaza he attended the Islamic University, became active in Islamic politics and joined the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.The Palestinian think-tank PASSIA said that shortly after the December 1987 outbreak of the first Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation, Shehadeh, along with Yassin and several other brotherhood members, founded the radical Hamas organization.Salah Shehadeh spent more than a decade in Israeli and Palestinian jails, and for the last three years was often in hiding as he oversaw Hamas’ frequent attacks.Shehadeh and Yassin were captured by the Israelis and imprisoned in 1988. Yassin was freed in 1997.Israeli military spokeswoman Capt. Sharon Feingold said that in 1999 Shehadeh was transferred to Palestinian custody under a peace agreement, and then released after a short spell in a Palestinian Authority prison.He spent most of the time since his release underground, evading at least three Israeli attempts to recapture or kill him, Palestinians said.Shehadeh was accused by the Israelis of ordering numerous attacks on Israeli troops and civilians, including the killing of four soldiers in a raid on an Israeli army outpost in Gaza in January and the March killing of five teenage students in the Jewish settlement of Atzmona, also in the Gaza Strip.A Hamas statement issued shortly after his death described him as “the hero, the leader.”He was a ‘ticking bomb’Shortly after the strike, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called the killing of Shehadeh “one of our biggest successes.”“This operation was in my view one of our biggest successes,” Sharon told Cabinet ministers. “We hit perhaps the most senior Hamas figure on the operational side,” Sharon said of Shehadeh, who had been on the most wanted persons list of Israel for a long time.Actually the Israeli troops had partially demolished Shehadeh’s family home in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanoun this February, but Shehadeh himself was not there. He rented a succession of apartments in Gaza City and never spent more than two or three nights in the same place, associates said.In May this year when the retreated Israeli army returned to the West Bank, having Shehadeh arrested or killed was one of their priority tasks. Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, the Israeli military planning director, said Israel had intelligence that Shehadeh was planning several large-scale terror attacks, including setting off a huge bomb under a bridge used by Israeli settlers in Gaza and landing suicide bombers on an Israeli beach by boat.Eiland told media that the operation to kill Shehadeh had been canceled several times because he was with civilians. But killed with Shehadeh that night in the Israeli air strike were his wife Leileh, 40, daughter Iman, 14, bodyguard Taher Nasser, 29, and other 11 Palestinians, including a two-month-old baby.Though some Israelis warned that the killing would backfire, leading to an upsurge in revenge attacks by Hamas, Israeli Cabinet Minister Yitzhak Levy said “there is no wrong time to kill a man who is a ticking bomb.” The only thing they were sorry about was killing and injuring many innocent civilians in the action. Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told Israel’s cabinet, “according to the information which we had there were no civilians near him and we express sorrow for the injuries to them,” said a statement from his office.World condemnation of the air strike was scathing for the same reason.

　　He was called the “bin Laden in Hamas” by the Western media. He was supposed to be the successor to Hamas’ spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin. He was described as the “most dangerous enemy to Israel” and was at the top of the Israeli army’s wanted list. And he was killed on July 23 when an Israeli warplane destroyed his apartment in Gaza City, taking the lives of 14 other Palestinians, most of them children, and injuring another 100 people. The man is Salah Shehadeh, whose death was called by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon “one of our biggest successes.”