JERUSALEM, 19 April 2004 — Sixteen years ago, as the Palestinians’ first intifada was blazing its way through the tumbledown refugee camps of the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian pediatrician named Abdelaziz Rantissi set himself on the path that ended Saturday with his assassination at Israel’s hands.
Together with the frail but fiery cleric Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Rantissi became a founding member of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas.
Rantissi’s stature as one of the group’s original leaders, and a close associate of Yassin, made it near-inevitable he would be the one to take over when the sheikh was killed by Israeli missiles fewer than four weeks ago.
And that, in turn, made it all but certain that Israel would target him next, as soon as Hamas succeeded in carrying out another suicide attack.
On Saturday, it did, and Israel did.
Last month, poised to step into the leadership role, Rantissi professed not to care what fate held in store for him.
“I am not afraid,’’ he said then. “Because I believe the last day for me is not in the hands of (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon, but in the hands of Allah.’’
Through his years in Hamas, Rantissi never aspired to the kind of religious role played by Yassin. Nor did he have much to do with shaping the movement’s Islamist-inspired ideology of martyrdom. Instead, he was an intellectual force in the movement, a strategist who was cool and calculating to the point of being chilling.
Even after assuming the leadership role, Rantissi did not have the kind of following in the streets of Gaza that Yassin did.
Unlike Yassin, his was not a cult of personality.
In death, however, he inspired similar displays of frantic devotion. Hours after he was killed, young followers beat on the doors of the morgue where his scorched, shrapnel-torn body lay, hoping to catch a final glimpse of his face.
Like so many of the Palestinian refugees who ended up in the Gaza Strip, Rantissi was born within sight of it — in the village of Yavna, just outside the coastal city of Ashkelon in what is now Israel.
He was a year old when fighting started in 1948 between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. The family fled the fighting and took shelter in the Khan Younis refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip.
One of 12 siblings, he was determined to get an education. He managed to make his way to Egypt to study medicine, and came home again to Khan Younis to practice it, working as a pediatrician in the camp hospital.
But his involvement with Palestinian militant causes steadily deepened. Israel authorities arrested him in 1983. Five years later, he was jailed again for his involvement in the nascent Hamas, an outgrowth of the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood.
Rantissi and his Hamas brethren shared another formative experience in 1992, when 400 of them were deported to Lebanon. There, under the influence of Shiite groups, they were exposed to extreme new techniques: Car bombs. Human bombs.
When he was allowed to return to Gaza, Rantissi ran afoul of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, which jailed him repeatedly. But Hamas soon had the upper hand in Gaza.
When the current conflict broke out in September 2000, the group, with its tightly disciplined cells, moved quickly to the forefront. It was the driving force between a campaign of suicide bombings in Israeli cities and towns — a tactic so bloody and effective, it triggered a massive Israeli military retaliation in the West Bank.
Hamas’ popularity soared. Impoverished camp dwellers depended on the group’s network of clinics and hospitals, while its fighters looked to Yassin for inspiration.
Rantissi knew well what was expected of him in his stand-in role, and for a few short weeks, he provided it.
“We will fight them everywhere,’’ he told a roaring crowd of supporters days after Yassin’s death. “We will hunt them everywhere; we will strike them everywhere.’’
Instead, it was he who found himself hunted and struck down.
