The Most Wanted Palestinian
By now, Israeli assassination operations against Palestinians have become as routine as Palestinian suicide bombings. Every terrorist act prompts an Israeli military response or what the Israelis call a ''targeted killing,'' which in turn elicits a murderous Palestinian retaliation -- particularly when the target is a leader of an armed wing like Al Qassam Brigades of Hamas; Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades of Fatah, Arafat's nationalist party; Islamic Jihad; or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The cycle has been spiraling unabated, with minor truces, for more than eight years, since Hamas launched its first suicide-bombing missions to avenge a massacre by an Israeli settler, Baruch Goldstein. And it shows no signs of abating: in just the week before this article went to press, Jerusalem suffered two suicide attacks in which 26 were killed and retaliated by killing 2 militants, seizing Palestinian lands and sweeping up thousands of Palestinians.

Most Israelis had never heard of Qeis Adwan (pronounced kice ODD-wahn) until he was killed and the newspapers reported his rap sheet: how he masterminded the suicide attacks at the Matza restaurant in Haifa on March 31, two days after the start of Operation Defensive Shield; at a Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem last August; and on a crowded railway platform in the coastal town of Nahariya the following month. Altogether, 31 Israelis died in the bombings, and scores more were wounded. To Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service, Adwan had become one of the most dangerous Palestinian militants, threatening enough to merit a carefully calculated -- and expensive -- assassination plot, right in the middle of the army's first emergency call to war since the invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

One morning a few weeks after Adwan's death, I met with a Shin Bet officer in Tel Aviv to find out why Adwan was considered to be so dangerous. ''He had three outstanding characteristics which were catastrophic from our point of view,'' the officer said: his ability to manufacture ever more potent bombs, his logistical imagination in the plotting and execution of the attacks and his leadership potential.

Adwan had emerged as the most popular and inspiring leader of the student union at An Najah National University in Nablus, which is, with 13,000 students, the largest in the West Bank. But he was also a longtime member of Hamas, the virulently anti-Israeli Islamic group. So when the second intifada began, in September 2000, he moved quickly into a more militant role, assuming command responsibility in the northern military wing of Hamas.

He not only recruited and dispatched suicide bombers but led attacks against Israeli military positions. He also pushed to improve the Palestinians' crude and so far ineffective Qassam rocket, a homemade weapon with a range of about five miles. He coordinated military attacks and financial matters for Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza (physical travel between the two is impossible for most Palestinians) and talked with affiliates in other countries. ''He's one of the few who were in touch with Hamas headquarters in Jordan and Syria,'' the Shin Bet officer said.

On March 31, two days after Israeli tanks rolled into Ramallah, Adwan produced his deadliest bomb yet and sent it off in an explosives belt with a young man from a village not far from his own. The bomber detonated himself in the Arab-run Matza restaurant, killing 15 and wounding more than 40. Among the dead -- many of whose bodies were disfigured beyond recognition by fire and shrapnel packed inside the bomb -- were several Israeli Arabs.

Listening to the Shin Bet officer's descriptions of Qeis Adwan's Haifa bombing -- ''an outstanding operation,'' ''he learns from his mistakes,'' ''he pulled off a difficult one, a first for Hamas'' -- I had the feeling that he almost admired his adversary in a professional way. But if he did, the feeling was tempered by moral revulsion.

''I've been in this business for 20 years,'' the officer said, ''and I've never encountered such a vicious and cruel terrorist as Qeis Adwan.''

It was an astonishing claim regarding such a young man barely out of college, given the long list of his predecessors -- among them, Yahya Ayyash, the prototype of the Hamas ''engineer'' (typically a bomb maker with an engineering degree) and originator of Hamas's suicide bombers.

Cross the Green Line into the West Bank, and not surprisingly, you find an entirely different portrait of Qeis Adwan. ''Kind,'' ''simple,'' ''flexible,'' ''polite,'' ''diligent,'' ''beloved.'' When I met his mother a few weeks after his death, she said, ''He never carried a gun.'' She was a tall, formidable woman, dressed in black with a white hijab tight around her face. Her eyes shone with pride in Qeis as she showed me a photograph of him crouching next to a snowman. ''He was an angel in a human body,'' she said. ''When he was young, he didn't even like to see insects die.''

One of Qeis's brothers, Nassar, a skinny 22-year-old studying civil engineering, told me he was taking an exam last summer when a friend passed him a newspaper with Qeis's name printed in a list of those most wanted by the Israelis. He raced home from Nablus. ''I opened the door, and Qeis looked at me and knew I knew, and that I wanted a reaction. He said: 'What they're saying is totally untrue. Is it possible I could be responsible for all this?'

''All of us knew it was the death sentence for Qeis,'' Nassar continued. ''In the past, if Israel suspected you, they arrested you. But in this intifada they send you a rocket.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/30/magazine/30HAMAS.html?pagewanted=all&position=top