Tale Of A Target

In front of him was a copper model of Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock, dusted clean, though the rest of the room was shabby. Behind him was a treadmill, unplugged and wedged into the corner, its disuse perhaps explaining his tubbiness. Framed like this, Sheik Jamal Salim sat for an interview with TIME a few days before the beginning of the Aqsa intifadeh last year, predicting that such an uprising against Israel was imminent. The sheik argued that it was not Hamas fundamentalists like him who endangered peace, but Israel. "I'm not dangerous," said the sheik, 43. "I'm a victim."

He is now. Last week Jamal Salim was decapitated by an Israeli missile while visiting a Hamas office in Nablus. The prominent preacher and political leader was also, according to Israeli officials, a key member of a Hamas network preparing a massive terror campaign against Israeli cities. Jamal Salim's story is a parable of the mounting violence and fatalism that have engulfed Palestinians, the tale of an admitted hard-liner with a thoughtful side who ended up consumed by a cause that has swung beyond politics into the realm of blood feud.

Salim's family were refugees from a village near Acre; he grew up in the dusty Ain refugee camp on the edge of Nablus. Arrested by Israel for the first time in 1975, he was jailed seven times in all and deported for a year to Lebanon. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat jailed him twice more during the times that Hamas radicals were subject to frequent roundups. For the last four years of his life, Salim, a popular teacher of religion at an Islamic school, never left Nablus. Colleagues on the National and Islamic Committee, a collection of Palestinian factions that organizes protest marches and rallies, say he was open to compromise. "He was flexible and tolerant," says Abdel Sattar Kassem, a professor at Nablus' an-Najah University and a friend of Salim's. But he never attempted to hide his beliefs; Salim told TIME that the peace process had failed to restore Palestinian rights and deserved to be overwhelmed by violence. "Islam is a very merciful religion, but the people don't believe in turning the other cheek," he said. "The military option is the natural outcome."

Opinions like that get noticed. Last month Israel asked Arafat to arrest a group of Palestinians it accused of terrorist activity. Salim was among them. Two weeks ago, he was in the mourning tent for Salah Darwazeh, a Hamas activist killed by an Israeli missile. Salim watched as his colleague in the Hamas leadership, Sheik Jamal Mansour, addressed the mourners. "This week you are seeing images of the martyrdom of Darwazeh!" the sheik yelled into the microphone. "Next week you might see my martyrdom." The only Hamas leader in the West Bank with more influence than Salim, Mansour died at his side in the helicopter attack.