Leader who threatens Arafat's power

Draped in brilliant white cloth, the old man with the full white beard, kindly eyes and gentle smile looks as saintly as Mother Theresa and as warm as Santa Claus. But Sheikh Ahmed Yassin is the spiritual leader of one of the most violent terrorist organisations in the world whose power among the Palestinians is growing as fast as Yasser Arafat's is fading away.

Hamas has so far refused to participate in formal Palestinian politics and labelled those who do " collaborators with the Israeli occupation". But if the party were to run in elections promised for next January, the leadership of the Palestinians could fall into the hands of men who don't believe Israel has the right to exist at all.

This week President Bush joined Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, in demanding that Yasser Arafat's rule over the Palestinians must end. Neither appears to have noticed that the next most popular leader in the West Bank and Gaza is a crippled Muslim cleric who inspires suicide bombers to kill Israeli civilians by the dozen at a time. Last week a suicide bomber sent by Hamas murdered 19 Israelis on a bus - many of them schoolchildren.

In response, Sharon launched another offensive on the West Bank, his troops now occupy all but one town and Arafat's security system has been reduced to rubble. If Arafat's administration is further destroyed by Israeli tanks and isolated by America, Hamas will inevitably take over, Palestinian analysts have warned.

Yassin, 66, speaks in a barely audible squeak. But his speeches echo across the Occupied Territories, where tens of thousands of young Palestinians hang on his every word. His messages are very clear, very simple, and compelling to angry young men - there will be no let up in the suicide bombings.

"The resistance [attacks on Israelis] will continue as long as the occupation of our lands continue. The Palestinian people are suffering and paying a very high price as a result of the Israeli aggression against us.

"But the Israeli enemy is suffering too and their lives are in danger at all times - so they are also paying a heavy price for the occupation," he said in an interview with the Evening Standard.

Hamas was put on America's list of banned terrorist organisations in November and some of its charities closed down. But millions of dollars flow into its coffers every year from supporters across the world. Its leadership admits that about 10 per cent of this is used for "military operations".

The rest goes into social programmes which have begun to eclipse Arafat's Palestinian Authority. While Arafat's administration has a reputation for stealing from the poor, the Hamas network known as the "dawa" - medicine - runs subsidised super markets, rebuilds homes destroyed by Israeli tanks, supplies school materials to the needy, food on religious holidays, free clinics and runs hundreds of free religious schools. "Sharon's policies and Bush's support for them have meant that there already is a vacuum in Palestinian society. If it gets any worse, it will be entirely filled up by Hamas and other Islamic groups and that would be a catastrophe for us all," warned Saleh Abdi Jawad, a professor of politics at Beir Zeit University on the West Bank.

Yassin lives in poverty on the edge of Gaza City. Crippled in his teens when doing hand stands on the beech in Gaza, he has spent his life studying Islam. But he is also seen as the mastermind of Hamas's terror strategy. In 1989, he was jailed for life by an Israeli court for ordering the killing of two men accused of collaborating with Israel but was released eight years later in a swap for two Israeli spies caught in Jordan.

In spite of his accident, he managed to father eight daughters and three sons while building up his movement. "I worked hard as a young man," he says with a grin and quips: "How many children have you managed?"

Now technically under "house arrest" in Gaza, Arafat's security forces won't go within 500 yards of his house for fear of being attacked by the sheikh's body guards. Two M16 rifles were stashed behind the door in his waiting room when I visited him. He lives in one room. It has a hospital bed, a wheel chair and sofas for guests. The walls are covered with the portraits of suicide bombers, there is a fax machine in the corner spilling messages on to the floor.

Surely the time has come to stop suicide bombings, if only because of the anti-Palestinian feeling and disgust they generate, I suggest.

"The world should rather look to the victims of the Israelis. Is it forbidden to spill Israeli blood but not Palestinian? Look at how many young people have been killed by the Israelis. The figures speak for themselves.

"Twenty-four per cent of the 1,600 Palestinians who have been killed are under 18. This week four children under 13 have been killed since Sunday. No one makes a noise about that," he retorts. His figures are accurate.

Opinion polls show support for Yassin hovering around 18 per cent, and 65 per cent of Palestinians support suicide bombings. Yasser Arafat garners between 25 per cent and 35 per cent. But among the politicallyactive men who are the driving force in Palestinian society, support for Yassin is up to well over 30 per cent. Across the board, radical Islamic groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad get the backing of a quarter of Palestinians - making them the second largest political force to Arafat's Fatah Party.

Would he participate in elections? "We would not take part in elections which were part of the continued occupation. We would run only in democratic elections," he replies enigmatically - leaving the door open, a little.