Salah Mustafa Shehada openly endorses armed attacks…

Salah Mustafa Shehada openly endorses armed attacks and suicide bombings.

The Palestinian guerrilla leader, forty-nine, is the commander of Izz al-Din al-Qassam, the military wing of the anti-Israeli Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement).

Nevertheless, many Palestinians admire him as an Islamic hero, and his charisma is responsible in part for increasing Hamas's ranks and support among the Palestinian populace.

He had been of the original founders of Hamas in the early 1980s and has been jailed twice by the Israeli government, which considers him the mastermind behind several bloody attacks, including a an attack by a lone, heavily-armed gunman at a religious school in Atzmona in March 2002 who shoots five Israeli students dead before falling to soldiers' bullets.