Give them points for consistency. Bloody, brutal consistency. Just one day after Israel assassinated Sheik Ahmed Yassin — the founder of the militant Islamist group Hamas — in an airstrike, an Israeli Defense Force security official said Israel had decided to “go after all the Hamas leaders,” according to an Associated Press article.

The Israeli army chief, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, said Yassin’s assassination should be seen as a signal “to all those who choose to harm us that this will be their end.”

Israel shouldn’t have to endure terrorism and suicide bombings. But if they have any interest in furthering the peace process — or, at the very least, not decimating the infrastructure and population of Israel and Palestine — they should realize that blatant assassination attempts aren’t the way to even a fractured peace.

The strikes on Hamas come at a time when Ariel Sharon has pledged to pull Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, a densely populated part of the Mediterranean coast which Israel seized from Egypt in the Six Day War of 1967. It is now home to around one million people, including some 6,500 Jewish settlers who control 30 percent of the land, according to the Guardian.

But Israel doesn’t want to be seen as being driven out of the strip by militants.

In the previous month, the Israeli Defense Force has killed more than 70 Palestinians in raids, as well as Sheikh Yassin.

Despite U.S. calls for cessation, Israel has continued to build settlements on the West Bank and Gaza, at a rate 35 percent higher than last year.

An advertisement last week in the Palestinian Authority’s newspaper al-Ayyam called on Palestinians to refrain from violence, saying the struggle against occupation should “rise again in a peaceful, wise large-scale uprising,” according to the Guardian.

The ad was signed by, among others, Hanan Ashrawi, the co-author of the Geneva accords and Abbas Zaki, a leading member of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement.

The Palestinians would obviously be wise to heed their words; the atrocities committed by suicide bombers are unspeakable and only further fan the flames of moral righteousness.

Creating martyrs and impenetrable walls doesn’t speak of a true commitment to any sort of peace process — and both sides are guilty of a blinding nationalism.

But the public announcement of a campaign to murder Hamas leaders, not all of whom subscribe to the violent methods Yassin advocated, indicates the creation of a formal policy of assassination.

We might as well tear up the road map and throw it away.