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In this Feb. 2, 2008 file photo senior Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar, left, and top Hamas official Said Siam, right, return from Egypt at the border at Rafah, southern Gaza Strip. An Israeli airstrike killed senior Hamas leader Said Siam in Gaza City on Thursday Jan. 15, 2009, flattening the building where he was staying.(AP Photo/Eyad Baba, File)
Palestinians gather around the crater caused by an Israeli strike which hit the house of top Hamas official Said Siam's brother in Gaza City, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2009. Officials from the Israeli military and Shin Bet security agency said Siam was killed while hiding in his brother's home in Gaza City. Siam is considered to be among Hamas' top five leaders in Gaza. Palestinian medical officials confirmed the house was attacked, but there was no word from Hamas on Siam's fate.(AP Photo/Khalil Hamra)Hamas's interior minister, Said Siam, was killed along with his brother Iad and his son, as well as another senior Hamas man in an IAF strike on a house in the Jabaliya neighborhood in Gaza City, Israeli defense officials told The Jerusalem Post.Siam was the Hamas political echelon's liaison with the group's military wing, and was responsible for the various security apparatuses in the Strip, including the police and the naval force.Siam was considered a radical and was in contact with Hamas's political leadership in Damascus. He was also considered close to Iranian officials.Siam was one of the masterminds of Hamas's violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in June 2007.Salah Abu Shrakh, the head of the Hamas general security service, was also killed in the air strike.Siam was the most senior Hamas man to be killed in almost three weeks of fighting.Hamas confirmed that Siam was killed with his brother and son. According to Palestinian reports, Mahmoud Watfa, one of the commanders of the Hamas military wing, was also killed in the strike.Responding to the assassination,Hamas exiled leader Khaled Mashaal said that "Israel has totally lost it." According to Mashaal, the hit was proof of Israel being "unnerved", since "it couldn't cope with the Palestinian resistance activists in the Gaza Strip battlefield."Mashaal asserted that "Israel has more fatalities than Hamas."Two weeks ago, the IAF dropped a one-ton bomb on the home of one of the group's top five leaders, Sheikh Nizar Rayyan, killing him and a reported 18 others.Rayyan was both the director and the financier of the 2004 terror attack at the Ashdod port, which killed 10 Israelis, and in October 2001 he sent his son to perpetrate a suicide attack in the Gush Katif settlement Elei Sinai, where two Israelis were killed.Rayyan also reportedly replaced Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as the organization's top clerical authority after Yassin's assassination in 2004.
AP contributed to this report
AP contributed to this report
By YAAKOV KATZ AND JPOST.COM STAFF
As in the days of Noah...
