Fear and Rage in Gaza, and Threats by Hamas
As graphic scenes of the latest suicide bombing flashed across his television screen, a top political leader of the militant Palestinian group Hamas hunched forward on his living room couch today, speaking to the broadcast over his cellphone.

"Sharon and his government have been assassinating our people, our women and our children!" the leader, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, told the viewers of an Arab news network, who saw his picture in a box beneath the gore. "They must pay a price for every crime they commit."

Dr. Rantisi said he had no idea whether the military arm of Hamas was responsible for today's attack, as an anonymous caller told one news agency office in Jerusalem. Another militant group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, issued a statement saying it had carried out the bombing.

But in an interview as he took calls from television and radio stations around the world, Dr. Rantisi waved away any notion that the bombing might have ended a lull in the violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

"This hasn't been a quiet week," he said. "Every day, the Israelis were killing Palestinians — in Rafah, in Tulkarm. So we have to attack them — in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem or anywhere else in Israel."

If the Palestinian leadership around Yasir Arafat was quick to condemn the killing of Israeli civilians today, Dr. Rantisi, a 54-year-old pediatrician, was just as quick to justify it. "Martyrdom operations," he said, would continue unabated so long as the Palestinians had no better way to fight the Israeli occupation of their territories.

Despite the bullet holes still visible in his garage door from a failed attempt by Mr. Arafat's police to arrest him last December, Dr. Rantisi added that he was unperturbed by the prospect that the Palestinian authorities might again crack down on Hamas and other Islamic militants.

Mr. Arafat is under two sets of pressures," he said. "One is from the Israelis, the Americans and the Europeans. But the other pressure is from his own people, and nearly all the Palestinians support martyrdom operations."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/20/international/middleeast/20GAZA.html