Israelis launch hunt for Shin Bet man's killers
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Your support makes all the difference.FOR THE second time in three weeks the Israeli government yesterday launched a manhunt for Islamic militants suspected of killing a member of the state's security forces.
Police yesterday confirmed earlier reports that Haim Nachmani, a 25-year-old officer with the Israeli security service, Shin Bet, was killed on Sunday in Israeli West Jerusalem by members of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement.
Hamas had not yesterday claimed responsibilty for the killing. But police said Mr Nachmani was killed by two members of Hamas, one a collaborator who had made an appointment to see the undercover officer at a safe house in West Jerusalem. Several members of the Palestinian collaborator's family had been arrested, police said.
Despite some similarities with the abduction and killing on 16 December of Nissim Toledano, an Israeli border guard, the reaction to Mr Nachmani's killing has, thus far, been relatively muted.
It was Mr Toledano's killing, following a spate of attacks on Israeli soldiers, which led to the deportation of 415 suspected supporters of Hamas and a smaller group, Islamic Jihad. Hours before Mr Nachmani died, the Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin had told a gathering of students that the deportations were a 'blow' against terrorism.
Maj Gen Danny Rothschild, co-ordinator of Israel's military government in the Israeli occupied territories, said yesterday: 'No one who decided on the deportations imagined that terrorist activity would stop on that day.'
With the absence of any statement from Hamas, the motive for Mr Nachmani's killing remained unclear. However, the killing appears to have been meticulously planned, heightening speculation that it was not a one-off revenge attack but a deliberate retaliation for the deportations.
While the deportations won massive support in Israel at the time, fears of such retaliation and the increase in violence in the West Bank and Gaza has raised new questions in the Israeli press about the wisdom of the move.
The deportees themselves, still trapped between Israeli and Lebanese front-lines, with little food or clean drinking water, were yesterday swift to make political capital out of the latest killing.
'Rabin has brought disaster on his people,' said Abdul Aziz al- Rantisi, a leading Hamas spokesman among the deportees. 'This deportation of clerics, doctors, engineers and educated people has proved to be a failure for Israel. It did not secure the safety of the Israelis. The killing of this Shin Bet officer boosts the morale not only of deportees but of the whole Palestinian people.'
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