ARABS-ISRAEL - Sep 26 - Israel Accused After Syria Car Bomb Killing.

A suspected military commander of Hamas Izzedin Shaikh Khalil, is killed when his booby-trapped car explodes in Damascus and the Palestinian militant group accuses Israel of carrying out the assassination. There was no official acknowledgement by Israel that it was involved in the death of Khalil. However, Israel's Channel-2 TV Sep 26 night quoted unnamed security sources as saying Israel was behind the bombing. Syrian officials also pointed the finger at Israel. Ahmad Haj Ali, an adviser to the Syrian information minister, told AP: "This is not the first warning Israel has tried to convey to Syria. What happened indicates that Israel's aggression has no limits". The killing had the hallmarks of a sophisticated operation. Witnesses to the incident outside Khalil's home in a south Damascus suburb said his vehicle exploded shortly after he started the engine and answered a call on his mobile telephone. The name of Syrian-based Khalil had been linked to attacks inside Israel from the late 1990s, although the Syrian interior ministry denied he carried out any activities on Syrian soil. He moved to Damascus after the Israeli authorities expelled him from the Gaza Strip to Lebanon in 1992. After Hamas killed 16 people in a double suicide bombing in the southern Israeli town of Beersheva on August 31, Israeli officials warned that its activists abroad were not immune from retaliation. Sep 26 killing comes two days after a London-based Arabic newspaper reported that an Arab state had passed information about Hamas leaders to Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. Hamas's exiled leadership has been lying low since the Beersheva bombing. Khaled Mashal, the movement's exiled leader whom Israel tried to kill in a bungled assassination attempt in Jordan in 1997, said during a visit to Cairo last week: "We are in a state of alert and vigilance". Last week the Syrian government was reported to have closed the Damascus offices of Hamas and other Palestinian groups, although it denies they are used to plan attacks on Israeli targets. Israeli forces have assassinated a number of senior Hamas figures in the Palestinian territories, including Shaikh Ahmad Yassin, the movement's Gaza leader, and Abdel Aziz Rantissi, his successor, killed within a month of each other this spring. Mossad has also carried out a number of killings abroad, although no operation has been acknowledged since the failed attempt on Mashal in 1997. Israeli aircraft last October raided what Israeli officials described as a Palestinian training camp near Damascus following a suicide bombing in Haifa. The government of Pres Bashar Al Assad has come under intense international pressure to suspend its alleged support for militant groups and to end its military presence in Lebanon. Syria last week redeployed a number of its troops in Lebanon following a UN Security Council demand for a complete withdrawal.