GAZA CITY, 21 May 2006 — The head of the Palestinian general intelligence, Gen. Tareq Abu Rajab, was injured yesterday in an assassination attempt at his Gaza City headquarters. One of Abu Rajab’s guards was killed and nine others were wounded when the elevator that the general took exploded.
“It’s a clear assassination attempt. We are launching an investigation to get to the perpetrators,” a senior General Intelligence Agency official said. Abu Rajab escaped an assassination attempt in 2004.
President Mahmoud Abbas ordered an immediate investigation into the explosion. He called the blast “unfortunate” and said it poses a “grave danger” to the Palestinian Authority.
Some Fatah members demanded Abbas dissolve the Hamas government and call early elections.
Tawfiq Tirawi, Abu Rajab’s West Bank-based deputy, said Hamas was responsible for the 2004 assassination attempt. Asked if Hamas was also responsible for yesterday’s attack, Tirawi said: “Everything is possible. I don’t rule anything out for now.”
The initial investigation, carried out by Palestinian security forces loyal to Abbas, found that a homemade bomb packed with metal pellets had been planted under the elevator’s floor, Tirawi said.
The wounded were driven to nearby Shifa Hospital in cars of the intelligence service. Fellow agents fired in the air from the windows of the vehicles to clear the way. Several members of a new Hamas militia fired toward the vehicles, possibly because they believed they were coming under attack, witnesses said. Abu Rajab underwent surgery at Shifa Hospital where doctors stopped the bleeding and stabilized him before taking the intelligence chief in a heavily guarded Palestinian ambulance to the Israel-Gaza border crossing. Israeli medical personnel treated Abu Rajab on the spot before putting him on the ambulance and transporting him to Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital.
After his arrival at Ichilov, the hospital said Abu Rajab was in serious condition, under sedation and hooked up to a respirator.
Israel meanwhile killed a top Islamic Jihad fighter and three other Palestinians in a missile strike in the Gaza Strip yesterday.
The missile strike on a car that carried Islamic Jihad’s Mohammad Al-Dahdouh also killed a boy, his mother and grandmother. Islamic Jihad promised retribution.
— Additional input from agencies
