A radical guerrilla leader who widened popular support for Hamas. Salah was one of the original founders of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, in the early 1980s. He also set up, with others, the military wing of Hamas, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades. Salah was born in Beit Hanoun, a village at the northern tip of the Gaza Strip, son of a humble Palestinian Arab refugee family whom Zionists had forced out of Jaffa, 35 miles to the north, during the 1948 war. Like so many refugees, he grew up radical and intensely religious. He was killed in an Israeli air strike in Gaza City. In the attack, an F-16 warplane fired 2,000-pound laser-guided bomb at the building where Salah was meeting his family. The strike also killed his wife Leileh, 40, his daughter Iman, 14, and 12 other Palestinians, including 8 children.