ABDELAZIZ RANTISSI, HAMAS LEADER (Translation): We say that it is now an open war with these murderers. There will be no security for them in Palestine.

Hamas has a new leader, Abdelaziz Rantissi, and he promises an escalation of violence to avenge the murder of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Israel's killing of the wheelchair-bound Yassin has enraged Palestinians and been condemned around the world. Although Israel has killed Hamas leaders in the past, the missile attack on Yassin has taken the Middle East to new heights of tension. Yassin was revered in Gaza as a leader prepared to stand up to Israel. This was his last interview.

SHEIKH AHMED YASSIN, (Translation): The Israeli threats of eliminating the Hamas leadership, the national leadership, are not new. Each time there is a martyr operation that opens this enemy’s wounds, the more it threatens, promises and rages.

200,000 Palestinians flooded on to the streets of Gaza for Yassin's funeral. The calls for revenge among Palestinians are predictable but there are many within Israel who also think this assassination is one provocation too many.

PROFESSOR AVRAHAM SELA, AUTHOR ‘THE PALESTINIAN HAMAS’: I did not believe, I mean before that, that the Israeli Government would go as far as eliminating or assassinating Sheikh Ahmed Yassin simply because of his political position and his sort of being beyond the actual fighting between the two sides. So in that sense, I had the feeling that Israel had gone far, too far.

Professor Avraham Sela knows a great deal about Hamas. He's written a landmark book about the militant movement and says that killing Yassin will have enormous implications.

PROFESSOR AVRAHAM SELA: As the founder of Hamas definitely he became a symbol, he became a religious authority, he has been adored by thousands of Palestinians as a leader who could really make a change in their lives in the sense that he created a movement that could give them support, that could give them communal services, welfare and other kind of support and because he symbolised the national as well as the religious sort of values of the Palestinians as a whole.

ARIEL SHARON, ISRAELI PM (Translation): The state of Israel this morning hit the first and foremost leader of the Palestinian terrorist murderers.

The Israeli rationale for killing Yassin was that he was personally responsible for directing suicide bombings, but Professor Sela doesn't agree.

PROFESSOR AVRAHAM SELA: I don't think that Sheikh Yassin directed the suicide bombings or the terrorist attacks. He definitely from a very early stage had to be very close to those people who executed the operations but only in the sense that he gave them the religious theological backing in the sense that he actually allowed it to happen. By killing Sheikh Yassin, I don't think that Israel is going to earn anything in terms of reducing or decreasing the scope of activities of Hamas on the military level.

While Israel accepts there will be an escalation of violence following its killing of Yassin, it says it's at war with Hamas and other terrorist organisations bent on destroying Israel. The Israeli Government has declared it's targeting all the Hamas leaders.
Professor Sela's book, controversial in Israel, challenges this approach, saying that Hamas is much more than a group of suicide bombers and Israel needs to understand this. In fact, from the formation of Hamas in 1987, Israel could see the value of an alternative to the PLO.

PROFESSOR AVRAHAM SELA: The Israeli government apparently perceived the Islamic movement as a counterbalance to those movements and to those terrorist groups thinking "Why not?" If they are only involved in religious and social activities, they could not be harmful to Israel. This, of course, changed once the intifada started at the end of 1987 and the Islamic movement adopted the violent strategy and actually became slowly the leading force in that effort.

In the years since then, Hamas has grown into the most popular movement in the Gaza Strip. It's the only group offering social services. It distributes food to the poor and provides money for orphans and widows. But such is the current desperation among Palestinians, it's likely that the popularity of Hamas stems as much from its suicide bombing as its social services.
Avraham Sela believes that Hamas is a social movement with a constituency and may even in future take steps towards recognising Israel. He thinks in time Israel will need to negotiate with Hamas. In the current climate, this is impossible. And with Sheikh Yassin gone, any future negotiation becomes more remote.

PROFESSOR AVRAHAM SELA: It's because of his prestige, because of his position and because of his influence that he could have probably, under certain circumstances, made decisions that would not be easy to absorb for his own constituency. With the elimination of such leaders, you actually face a situation in which you would have to work hard to find a leadership with the sufficient legitimacy and prestige within their own constituency that would be able to make such decisions. Actually, by killing Yassin, and probably if Israel continues to do these operations against other leaders as well, there will be nobody to negotiate with and this is definitely a clear indication that, at least from the view point of those who voted for the decision to kill Ahmed Yassin, there is no intention actually to negotiate with this movement and with the leadership of this movement but simply to fight against them.

The intifada that began in 2000 destroyed the dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians. Having effectively destroyed the Palestinian Authority and refused to negotiate with Arafat, it's hard to see who there is to reach a settlement with. If Israel does withdraw from Gaza as planned, Hamas appears ready to fill the power vacuum.