The big question following the assassination of a top Hamas operative in downtown Damascus, Syria, yesterday is whether the Palestinian Arab terror group intends to retaliate by taking its campaign outside Israel.

Shortly after the car of Izz El-Deen Al-Sheikh Khalil was blown to pieces, Hamas announced it would attempt to hit Israelis and others all over the world.

“We have allowed hundreds of thousands of Zionists to travel and move in capitals around the world in order not to be the party that shifts the struggle overseas,” a Hamas statement broadcast on the Al Jazeera network said. “But the Zionist enemy has done so and should bear the consequences of its actions,” the statement said.

Several hours later, however, Hamas changed its tune, announcing that the policy of avoiding targets outside Israel and the territories had not changed. “Our policy was and remains to conduct our struggle inside the Zionist entity,” a spokesman, Osama Hamdan, said.

An Israeli official in Jerusalem told The New York Sun that Iranian fingerprints seemed to be all over the quick Hamas about-face. He explained that after yesterday’s killing of Khalil, the Hamas leaders are more dependent on Iran than ever, as Syria must start acting against them. According to reports from the region, several Hamas leaders have recently moved from Damascus to Qatar, Bahrain, and Tehran.

Unnamed Israeli officials were quoted by several Israeli and international news organizations as saying Israel was behind the killing of Khalil.

The Hamas official answered his cellular phone as he entered his Mitsubishi sport-utility vehicle yesterday morning and then was blown up by a bomb that was apparently hidden underneath the car.

Though many Palestinian Arab terrorists live in a heavily fortified refugee camp, Khalil’s home was in the affluent al-Zahraa district of the Syrian capital. His car was parked only 30 feet from the house, and, according to a Hamas spokesman, Mohammed Nazzal, it exploded as Khalil tried to start the engine.

“We never publicly own up to such operations,” the Israeli official told the Sun, pointing to a long series of assassinations in Europe in the 1970s aimed at the perpetrators of the massacre of Israeli athletes in the Munich Olympics. As was widely reported later, that assassination campaign was carried out by Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, but it was never acknowledged officially by Israel.

The assassination of Khalil, the first of its kind in the heart of Damascus, was officially denounced by Syria as terrorism. “What happened indicates that Israel’s aggression has no limits,” an adviser to the Syrian information minister said. The adviser, Ahmad Haj Ali, said the Khalil assassination “was meant to deliver a message to the entire world that says, ‘We are capable of striking anywhere in accordance with the Israeli agenda.’ “

Syria is, however, under international pressure, with a Security Council resolution condemning its occupation of Lebanon and the Bush administration leaning on it. A recent demarche was delivered to Damascus by the Bush State Department’s Middle East coordinator, William Burns, telling Syria to cooperate more in closing its borders with Iraq and to expel leaders of terror organizations, including Hamas.

“I’m sure the Syrians are not shedding tears tonight,” the Israeli official said, explaining the thinking behind the timing of the operation. He said President Assad, whose hold on the reins of power is shaky and who is considered too weak to close forcefully the terrorist headquarters in Syria, could point to the assassination in warning terrorist leaders to leave his country.

The assassinated Khalil was described by Israelis as personally involved in terrorism inside Israel. Born in Gaza either 42 or 44 years ago, he became one of the top operatives of the so-called political wing of Hamas. He had responsibility for coordinating operational details from Damascus with Hamas’s military cells in Gaza and the West Bank, according to security officials quoted in the Israeli press.

In 1982, Khalil was one of 400 Hamas leaders who were expelled by Israel to Lebanon from Gaza. In recent times, according to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, he oversaw weapons smuggling into the Gaza Strip, most recently attempting to complete a large delivery that had been stuck across the border in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Khalil operated directly under Haled Mashaal, the head of the political wing.

After the August 31 double bus bombing in the southern Israeli town of Beersheba, several Israeli officials pointed to the Hamas headquarters in downtown Damascus as the place where the terrorist act was hatched. Both Prime Minister Sharon and the army chief of staff, Moshe Ya’alon, indicated there would be no immunity anywhere to those who operate against Israelis.

Several Hamas leaders went underground and Syrian officials moved publicly to close the organization’s headquarters. Phone lines were cut and doors were bolted. Mr. Mashaal disappeared for a few days, only to pop up in Cairo, where Egypt has convened a summit of terrorist leaders in an attempt to declare a cease-fire.

A London-based pan-Arabic daily, Al-Hayat, reported Friday that a dossier with the names of leaders of major terror organizations was handed by an intelligence agency of a certain unidentified Arab country to the Israeli Mossad.

The dossier, according to the report, was ordered up by the Mossad director, Meir Dagan. According to a Ha’aretz intelligence analyst, Yossi Melman, Mr. Dagan has developed the doctrine of hitting terror leaders anywhere in the world, including Arab capitals. That is a throwback to the 1950s, when Israelis struck targets deep inside Arab countries.