If progress towards Middle East peace consists largely of one small step forward and two massive steps back, the Israeli assassination of the Hamas guerrilla leader, Salah Mustafa Shehada on July 22nd aged 50, is yet another display of such deadly manoeuvring.
Salah Shehada was born in Beit Hanoun, a village at the northern tip of the Gaza Strip, son of a humble Palestinian Arab refugee family whom Jewish fighters had forced out of Jaffa, 35 miles to the north, during the 1948 war. Like so many refugees, he grew up radical and intensely religious, educated first in schools run by the UN Palestinian specialist refugee agency, then at Cairo University, where he took a degree in social sciences; like Yasser Arafat 20 or so years earlier, while there he would have made contact with like-minded Palestinian and other Arab radicals and, almost inevitably, have joined or at least fraternised with the Moslem Brotherhood.
Back in Gaza, he became one of the original founders, with its present leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, of that by-product of the Moslem Brotherhood, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas (the word also means "zeal"), in the early 1980s. Then, Palestinian ideas of self-determination and an end to Israeli occupation were burgeoning among the young generation in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza, replacing the shock and despond after the defeat in the Six-Day War in 1967. Salah Shehada's base was the Islamic University in Gaza City, which is for Hamas and its supporters the fount of ideas, organisation and activity.
In 1984, the Israelis jailed Salah Shehada for two years for his underground political work, releasing him in time to take the Palestinian/Islamic effort a significant stage further at the beginning of the first Intifada, or uprising, towards the end of 1987. With a few others, he began the military wing of Hamas, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, named after a Palestinian fighter-preacher killed by British police during the Mandate.
The Israelis arrested Salah Shehada in 1988, jailing him for 10 years, in time for him to emerge into the final and bloody years of the Oslo experiment. By this time, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades he had launched had become a highly effective, if primitively armed, force - authors of a campaign against the Israelis and Israeli targets, including settlers.
Under Salah Shehada, the brigades built, and launched, the Qassam-1 and Qassam-2 field rockets, with a range of a mile or two, and a variety of bombs, grenades and tank traps; they also developed more effective guerrilla tactics.
He had been close to Hamas leader, Sheikh Yassin, a revered figure whom he admired, but was also said to want to replace.
Salah Shehada's publicly stated belief was that there should be no quarter given and no deals, not with Israel or the Palestinian Authority, which has tried with little lasting result to rein in Hamas and others like-minded. There should, he said, be no end to armed attacks and suicide bombings.
He told a Jordanian weekly magazine a couple of months ago: "We don't fight the Jews because they are Jews . . . we fight them because they occupy our lands and home."
Salah Shehada's wife Leila, aged 45, and their daughter Iman (15), both died with him in the air strike against their home.
Salah Mustafa Shehada: born 1952; died, July 2002