KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — The militant known as Abu Hamza is constantly on the run from Israel, and his hideout today is a dank room at the back of a nondescript house filled with adults and frolicking children.
The room is barren except for a computer hooked up to the Internet, which the Islamic Jihad commander said is used to plan rocket attacks on southern Israel. He pledged to keep up the violence despite the growing likelihood of a major Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip.
“We must create a balance of terror with the enemy,” he said in a rare interview.
Abu Hamza is a small, soft-spoken man with a wide smile, but the rockets that Islamic Jihad fires into Israel almost daily serve as constant reminders that renewed talk of Mideast peace remains a distant dream in the violence-torn Gaza Strip.
Israel’s military says Gaza militants have fired some 980 rockets into Israel since June, when Hamas seized power in the coastal territory. That compares with 440 in the preceding four months. In all, thousands of crude rockets fired over the past seven years have killed 12 Israelis, wounded dozens and disrupted life for thousands.
Israeli troops and settlers withdrew from Gaza more than two years ago — and Israel has begun a fledgling peace process with the moderate Palestinian forces now in control of the West Bank. So why is Islamic Jihad still raining missiles on Israeli towns, provoking fierce retaliation and a new Israeli threat to cut off Gaza’s electricity?
This is the Palestinians’ way of offsetting Israel’s sophisticated military machine, Abu Hamza said. Israel’s decision to seal Gaza’s borders after Hamas militants took control is another reason the rockets are justified, he said.
“Our rockets go over those borders,” he said.
Islamic Jihad, a virulently anti-Israel group backed by Iran and Syria, has killed dozens of Israelis in suicide bombings and is believed to have about 2,000 militants armed with M-16 and AK-47 automatic rifles, grenades and anti-tank weapons.
It operates independently of the much larger Hamas, whose tolerance and sometimes encouragement of rocket attacks have increased Gaza’s isolation. Hamas’ blind eye to Islamic Jihad rockets — along with mortar fire by its own militants — has helped burnish its credentials among Gazans as a “government of resistance.” But it is also endangering Hamas’ rule in Gaza by contributing to the economic decline.
Contacts known to be Islamic Jihad members arranged the meeting with Abu Hamza, his nom de guerre that is well known in Gaza even if his face is not. He spoke without donning the black ski mask usually worn by senior militants in press interviews, but he refused to allow himself to be filmed, photographed or recorded.
Abu Hamza spoke softly and methodically, making frequent eye contact with an American reporter. But there was no mistaking the bitterness of his words.
“Resistance must continue until we uproot the occupation from all the land of Palestine … from the sea to the river,” he said, outlining Islamic Jihad’s position that a future Palestinian state must replace Israel, not live alongside it.
He bragged about an Islamic Jihad rocket attack last month that injured dozens of Israeli soldiers as they slept in tents at an army base near Gaza, saying the installation was targeted through studying Israeli military Web sites. There was no way to independently confirm his claim.
He said that Palestinian rocket fire forced Israel out of Gaza in 2005 and that he expected the same result in southern Israeli towns like Sderot and Ashkelon.
At one point, Abu Hamza said his group would consider a temporary halt to rocket fire if Israel stopped pursuing militants and opened Gaza’s borders. But that statement was rendered meaningless by his subsequent assertion that other forms of “resistance” — such as suicide attacks and roadside bombs — would continue during any rocket truce.
Israeli intelligence officials declined to discuss Abu Hamza, saying they prefer not to divulge information about wanted militants who are still on the run.
But a top architect of Israel’s military policy in Gaza was quoted Thursday in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot as saying the rocket attacks will have to be confronted with a major display of armed force.
“A ground operation is a question of timing,” said Maj. Gen. Moshe Kaplinsky, the Israeli army’s recently reassigned deputy chief of staff.
Israel’s frequent and lethal retaliation has prompted innovations by Gazan rocket launchers, including using trees as cover and timers to set off rockets.
To evade Israeli troops and aircraft, Abu Hamza said he and his fighters move frequently from place to place, change vehicles often and avoid using cell phones in open areas.
The interview took place in a house where toddlers laughed and played. Islamic Jihad has often been criticized for operating among civilians, exposing them to the risk of Israeli fire.
Abu Hamza denied the assertion by Israel and much of the world that Islamic Jihad gets money and other backing from Iran and Syria, calling it “completely ridiculous.”
But Mkhaimar Abusada, a political scientist at Gaza’s Al Azhar University, said there is no doubt Syria and Iran are involved.
“There are outsiders giving orders from outside the Gaza Strip, whether from Damascus or Tehran, for their own reasons,” Abusada said. “They (Gaza militants) are doing this because they’re getting paid for it.”
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