[Ha'aretz - Wednesday, October 17, 2001]

Gunmen mortally wounded Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi at around 7 A.M. Wednesday near his room in Jerusalem's Hyatt Hotel, and Ze'evi died of his wounds three hours later in Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital.

The radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility for the attack, citing Israel's targeted killing of the organization's leader, Abu Ali Mustafa, in his Ramallah office on August 27.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon convened senior security and cabinet officials at 10 A.M. (0800 GMT) to discuss the shooting and Israel's response.

Senior physicians at Jerusalem's Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital said that Ze'evi, 75, had been shot twice in the head. They declared him dead at 10 A.M.

"Minister Ze'evi arrived at the hospital dead, with no pulse and no respiration," said Professor Avi Rifkin, a senior trauma physician. "As a last-ditch attempt to resuscitate him, we opened his chest and carried out direct heart massage. The heart resumed beating. We then began all sorts of procedures, but ... all of our efforts failed."

Ze'evi, leader of the far-right National Union-Yisrael Beiteinu bloc, announced Monday that he and party colleague Avigdor Lieberman were resigning from the government in protest over cabinet decisions they viewed as too soft on Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. The resignations were to have taken effect at 1.30 P.M. on Wednesday.

Ze'evi, a former army major general, was the acknowledged arch-hawk of Israeli politics, having entered the Knesset 13 years ago at the head of a controversial campaign to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by

carrying out a mass "transfer" of Palestinians.

Meanwhile, National Union-Yisrael Beiteinu party members Wednesday pressed Lieberman to withdraw his resignation in the wake of the shooting.

Jerusalem Police Chief Mickey Levy said Ze'evi, who supported the idea of transfer, was unguarded at the time of the attack. The Shin Bet security service's VIP Bodyguard unit ordered cabinet ministers and Knesset members

to remain in their homes or in other "secure areas" in the wake of the shooting, but Army Radio reported that not all heeded the call.

Ze'evi's wife said Wednesday that she found him "Lying, without a pulse" on the floor of the hotel hallway in front of their room.

The gunmen, whose identity was not known, apparently escaped. The hotel is located adjacent to East Jerusalem and to Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank. It is also only several hundred meters from the national

police headquarters.

Palestinian militant groups had warned in the past that if Israel continued its policy of targeted killings of suspected terrorist commanders and other Palestinian figures, Israeli officials would become targets as well. The PFLP, in particular, had threatened to carry out a revenge attack after the assassination of their leader.

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