followed, in which some three hundred Hamas cadres were seized from the West Bank. [3] On 19 August 2003 a self-proclaimed 'Hamas' cell from Hebron, disowned and denounced by the official leadership, blew up a bus in West Jerusalem, upon which Israel promptly assassinated the Hamas ceasefire's negotiator, Ismail Abu Shanab. Hamas in turn responded. In return, the Palestinian Authority and Arab states cut funding to its charities and, in September 2003, the eu declared the whole Hamas movement to be a terrorist organization -- a long-standing demand of Tel Aviv. What has actually distinguished Hamas in a hopelessly unequal combat is not dispatch of suicide bombers, to which a range of competing groups resorted, but its superior discipline -- demonstrated by its ability to enforce a self-declared ceasefire against Israel over the past year. All civilian deaths are to be condemned, but since Israel is their principal practitioner, Euro-American cant serves only to expose those who utter it. Overwhelmingly, the boot of murder is on the other foot, ruthlessly stamped into Palestine by a modern army equipped with jets, tanks and missiles in the longest armed oppression of modern history. 'Nobody can reject or condemn the revolt of a people that has been suffering under military occupation for forty-five years against occupation force': the words of General Shlomo Gazit, former chief of Israeli military intelligence, in 1993. [4] The real grievance of the eu and us against Hamas is that it refused to accept the capitulation of the Oslo