GAZA CITY (AFP) — Abu Suheib knows that the Israeli drones circling overhead are searching for him, spies are eyeing him from the shadows and that his life will likely end in the fireball of a midnight airstrike.
"I know that I could die at any moment, at any place," the 28-year old senior leader in the armed wing of the radical Islamic Jihad movement says. "But in the Koran it is written that we must fight until the Day of Judgment."
Israel has vowed to kill men like Abu Suheib, militants responsible for the rocket attacks that have cast a shadow of fear across southern Israel and provoked calls for another full-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip.
Earlier this week, Israel killed 12 Palestinian militants in a storm of air strikes. Among them was Majed al-Harazin, the 38-year-old chief of the Al-Quds Brigades -- Abu Suheib's group -- the most senior militant killed in months.
Islamic Jihad has vowed to exact revenge with a wave of rocket attacks and suicide bombings, and Abu Suheib says the movement will endure. "For every one of us that gets killed we have 50 who can take his place," he says.
For a man who has been on Israel's most wanted list for six years, Abu Suheib (his nom de guerre) seems remarkably calm as he sips coffee and smokes a cigarette near the back of a kebab restaurant in Gaza City.
In fact, his eyes rarely glance towards the two dour young men in black shirts and caps watching the door. Outside, a man sits low in a car parked across the street, scanning the road and appearing to speak into a walkie-talkie.
Abu Suheib, a short, stocky man with a trimmed black beard, never sleeps at home and only sees his wife and three small children about once a month. They know virtually nothing about his life, except that he is a fighter.
He only communicates via text messages, "because if you use a phone the planes can find you," he says.
He and his comrades have secret names for places and people, rendezvous points from Beit Lahiya in the north to Rafah on the Egyptian border, and "the entire Palestinian people support us," he adds.
They blend in easily, disappearing in Gaza's packed cities and swollen refugee camps. Some people, however, prefer to keep their distance.
When moving from safe house to safe house "we either walk or we take taxis," he says, adding that the drivers never know who he is. "If they know they will not take us; they will be scared."
He knows the risks of his occupation better than most of Gaza's militants because in 2005 he barely survived an air strike that was supposed to kill him.
"There are spies everywhere. I left a meeting with other leaders, and when I was only 150 metres (yards) away from the house the missile hit our car, killing the three people who were with me," he says.
"The explosion blew the door open, and I was thrown five or six metres away from the car."
He lost most of his right leg in the explosion and his face and torso are wrinkled with scars. He walks with a cane, but his face lights up at the thought of returning to the battlefield.
When asked if he is concerned about reports that Israel is mulling another full-scale invasion of Gaza his round face curls into a smile. "Ahlan wa sahlan," he says, using a typical Arabic greeting.
"If they come I will fight them, and if they kill me I will die as a martyr to God. I will go to heaven," he says, his wide-eyed expression revealing an almost childlike enchantment.
Despite the political divisions left by the Islamist Hamas movement's seizure of Gaza six months ago, Abu Suheib says all of Gaza's factions -- even the ousted Fatah party of president Mahmud Abbas -- fight as one.
He claims, along with many Israeli military experts, that militants are prepared for an invasion and are ready to deploy new weapons, including sophisticated remotely detonated tank mines.
But he refused to say whether any of the new weapons came from Syria or Iran, which Israel has long accused of aiding Palestinian militants.
As for reports that Hamas is seeking a ceasefire with Israel, Abu Suheib says Islamic Jihad would refuse any demand to halt rocket attacks.
But he says he would support a two-state solution to the conflict, at least for the present time, if Israel halted its operations in Gaza.
"When Abu Mazen (Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas) told us to stop firing missiles we stopped, but the Israelis kept attacking us," he says.
In the meantime, he envisions a long struggle, the end of which he will most likely not live to see.
"My (four-year-old) son sees the planes. He tells me,'the planes came and shot at people,'" Abu Suheib says. "He will be in the resistance when he is older, just like me, because he hates the Jews."
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