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Ehud Ya'ari: Keep the Gloves Off

What was the case on the eve of the Yassin assassination is much more true now: Hamas will murder as many Israelis as it can

The Worst mistake that Israel could now make would be to stop pursuit of the terror leaders. It�s a mistake Dr. Abd al-Aziz Rantisi and his colleagues apparently believe we will not make: Directly after the ceremonies of mourning for Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and the coronation of Rantisi as his successor in the Gaza stadium, they slipped deep underground and switched off their cellphones.

Hamas�s fiery rhetoric of revenge is reaching new peaks, and they will strike to the full extent of their capability; Israel therefore must not ease the pressure. What was the case on the eve of the Yassin assassination is much more true now: They will murder as many Israelis as they can, and they will try as hard as ever, particularly now that the chase is on. This is the simple truth: If Sharon orders a halt to the targeting of the terror contractors, the liquidation of Yassin will come to represent the turning point, at which Hamas realizes its dream of achieving a balance of terror against Israel.

The Hamas leadership well understands that despite all the death and destruction it has sown in Israel, it has not yet succeeded in creating deterrence. It sees that the army doesn�t hesitate to send its tanks into the refugee camps of the Gaza Strip, or its Apache attack helicopters to intercept its leaders, who would have liked to think of themselves as immune from attack. In the week that Yassin was killed, the Palestinians lost another 70 lives, most -- though regrettably not all -- from among the armed gangs. As they see it, Sharon has almost unlimited freedom of operation, and therefore it is urgently necessary to find a new method of scaring Israel into restraint. They talk about this incessantly, but by late March had not yet found the answer.

Their fear is a repeat performance in Gaza of what happened to Hamas in the West Bank. There, about 90 percent of the Hamas terrorist infrastructure has been shattered through a combined effort of the army and the Shin Bet security service since the Defensive Shield operation of 2002. Today there is no effective Hamas military apparatus between Hebron and Jenin, but only a handful of isolated cells that have great difficulty launching "quality attacks," as they call them. The West Bank Hamas leadership has either been wiped out in targeted killings .The senior operational echelon is mostly dead, other than one member, Ahmed Badr, who is still in hiding. As a result, Fatah is launching most of the attacks from the West Bank, after a long period when Hamas carried out the most deadly ones.

The fate of Hamas in the West Bank proves that a systematic, uncompromising campaign bears fruit.

It is true that the Gaza Strip is different in many respects. But only one difference really counts: In contrast to the West Bank, in Gaza Hamas has an armed militia, not just terror cells, something along the lines of a "popular army" that is hastily being built. So far Israel has not acted against this militia, whose cadres are not for the most part involved in serious terror acts. But if the popular army is allowed to develop, it will turn into a parallel, highly-motivated armed force to rival the puny security apparatuses of the Palestinian Authority. From the moment that Hamas achieves its goal of a militia of thousands of fighters, there will be no hope of stopping it from turning the Gaza Strip into "Hamas-stan," like the "Hizballahstan" that rose up in the wake of the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon.

Hamas makes no secret of its plans. For example the Lebanon-based Ossama Hamdan, the main Hamas liaison with Hizballah, spoke in an interview on Hizballah�s Radio Nur of recruiting thousands of suicide bombers in order to carry out a large number of attacks simultaneously, perhaps in one location, Al-Qaeda-style. This is not vain talk. Hamas is working flat out towards this end, with the funding, guidance and encouragement of Hizballah�s Sheikh Nasrallah. The Hamas leadership�s belief is that a series of blows of this kind would "shock" Israel and bring this current round to its end game.

The army�s insistence on sticking to the credo of "limited conflict" has determined Israel�s response since the beginning of the intifada, meaning restraint in its use of force, and selectivity and caution in its preemptive actions. There are now those in the army questioning this approach, which is the cause of the slow, limping pace of the war on terror. The debate now under way in the army�s theoretical monthly journal, Ma�arachot, deals with the argument that it is precisely the credo of limited conflict that is dragging out the bloodshed over time, while this current intifada has in fact been an "all-out confrontation" from the start, with only the means used to fight it limited for the time being.

As for Hamas, it has no limitations. Its terrorists have tried in the past to add cyanide and other poisons to their explosives. They planned to bring down the Shalom Tower in Tel Aviv. They send women and children as suicide bombers, and they are striving to pull off a mega-attack, which they already attempted in Ashdod.