LATE on Christmas Day, one of Israel’s most wanted men was moving furtively from one safe house to another for the fifth time in less than 24 hours.

Wrapped in a khaki jacket, with the peak of his baseball cap pushed down over his face, Jamal Abu Samhadana travelled in five vehicles and walked through rain, thunder and lightning to reach the place where he would sleep that night. His mobile telephone was switched off because he had used the same number for as long as he believed he could without being detected.

For Abu Samhadana, 39, this was business as usual. As the founder of the Popular Resistance Committees, a militia made up of disenchanted members of all the Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip, he is blamed by Israel for a long series of attacks on settlers and soldiers. These include the destruction of three tanks by landmines in separate incidents in which seven men died.

An Israeli newspaper report earlier this month called him one of the most coveted targets of Shin Bet, the internal security service. An aide, Mustafa Sabah, was killed by anti-tank rockets fired from a helicopter 25 days ago. He remains almost constantly on the move: in the course of last week he worked and napped in 70 different places.

Pinning Abu Samhadana down is therefore no easy task. “It is not always as bad as this,” he said when we finally met late at night after two previous rendezvous had been called off.

“Over the last two years I have slept in more than 200 locations. I prefer not to sleep in the same place two nights in a row. In fact, I do not like to spend more than half an hour in any one place.”

He yearns for the rare days when he can snatch time with his family, playing a computer game with his children or poring over their homework. Yet although his wife Amal is pregnant for the fifth time, he believes his family will be more secure if he is killed and longs for a martyr’s death in combat. “My greatest ambition is to be a threat to the Israelis even when they are killing me,” he said.

The strain of Abu Samhadana’s secret life is evident in the lines around his eyes, but he never misses a chance to lighten the mood. When a 26-year-old comrade announced that his wife was expecting their ninth child, he declared: “You see, all our wives have got to do is smell our trousers and they get pregnant.” His men roared with laughter.

Known to followers as “the Chef” because of his enthusiasm for making bombs with a variety of ingredients, he is hated with equal fervour by the Israeli military and Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. He has defied repeated instructions from the authority to disband his organisation.

He maintains working relationships with other militant groups, including the military wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which carried out Friday night’s suicide attack on the West Bank settlement of Otniel when two gunmen killed four students.

“All factions liaise and exchange information — recipes for home-made explosives and military tactics — and at times we even co-ordinate attacks together since we all have a common cause,” Abu Samhadana said.

He was the field commander of the Popular Resistance Committees until earlier this year, when he blew off part of his right arm while firing a rocket-propelled grenade at a Jewish settlement. A team of French surgeons from Médecins Sans Frontières performed a 10-hour operation, taking a bone from his left leg and inserting it below the elbow to save the injured arm.

Although Abu Samhadana no longer takes part in the operations he organises, he is understood to have been behind attacks dating back to October 2000 when an Israeli armoured personnel carrier was blown up, injuring two soldiers. A month later his men shot dead the driver of an Israeli truck. Then they killed a settler in his car.

The beginning of 2001 saw a marked escalation. In three weeks they killed one Israeli in a shoot-out at the refugee camp at Rafah, two more on a bus at the edge of the town and another three in a suicide mission against the Jewish settlement at Kfar Darom.

But it was the destruction of the tanks this year that earned Abu Samhadana his place on the “most wanted” list. The 60-ton Merkava Mk 3 tanks have 120mm guns, 60mm mortars and ultra-sophisticated electronic equipment that should enhance the protection of crews.

Last February three soldiers were killed when their tank was blown up near the Netzarine settlement on the outskirts of Gaza City; three more died in similar circumstances in March; then another in September.

Abu Samhadana speaks bluntly about these operations. While the main aim was to kill as many soldiers as possible, he says, they were also intended to instil fear in tank crews “that these mean machines would not be able to protect them from our landmines”.

He regrets his organisation’s failure to carry out suicide attacks on civilian targets in Israel, saying he has decided to concentrate on killing settlers and soldiers because it is too difficult to penetrate the Israeli security cordon around the Gaza Strip.

But while he denies he is a terrorist, he applauds the havoc the suicide bombers have wreaked on ordinary Israelis during more than two years of intifada.

The bombings were necessary, he said, to “plant the seeds of terror” among them. “If my wife is afraid to send the kids to school, so should their wives be. If my sister is afraid of going to the market, so should they be afraid.

“Only when they suffer the same sense of insecurity and fear will the Israeli people demand of their government to . . . allow us our statehood.”

How does a man who cherishes his own family come to believe that the bombing of Israeli women and children can be justified?

Abu Samhadana comes from a clan with a long history of fighting the Israelis. Two elder brothers died fighting Israel in Lebanon. His father, mother, several other brothers and two sisters were all jailed during the first intifada, which started in 1987.

An elder brother, Sammy, is suspected by the Israelis of being the Gaza leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a group that has carried out some of the bloodiest suicide bombings of the past year.

Abu Samhadana received three years’ training in urban warfare and explosives techniques in East Germany in the 1980s, where he learnt his craft alongside militants from Cuba and Nicaragua. He spent the 1991 Gulf war in Iraq but returned to his homeland in 1994 with Arafat. Ever the rebel, in 1999 he was jailed for 18 months by the Palestinians after leading protests against food price increases.

He emerged from prison fired by a single-minded determination to wage his own war, regardless of the personal cost.

Abu Samhadana is philosophical about his fate: “You can take precautions but in the end only the pilot of the F-16 and God know who the target of the day is. There is no point in dwelling on that. Instead, I enjoy my wife and my time with my children.”

His family moves at least once every two months and his sons, Attaya, 12, and Imad, 9, must always use false names when they introduce themselves to new playmates. “They have had to grow up before their time and be responsible and aware of the dangers around, but in the long run this will pay off. They are learning that freedom is not granted, but comes at a heavy price,” he said.

“I go home wanting to play with them and be a normal dad doing normal things like going through their schoolwork and trying to switch off from the war. They want to talk war and learn about guns.”

His daughter Reem, 4, and youngest son Mohammed, 2, do not yet know about the dangers. “Reem clings to my legs, kisses and hugs me constantly, brushes my hair and is always asking her mum to call me when I’m away,” he said.

“My wife has had to become the man of the family, but when I arrive home she bathes me, feeds me, provides me with clean clothes and simply spoils me without asking for much in return.

“When I leave there are no tears or pleas to stay and no tantrums about the life I have chosen — just wise words to be careful and stay in touch when possible. She is some woman.”

Abu Samhadana says he does not worry about what will become of them after his death. “I am certain they would live a better life than the one they have now,” he said.

“At least the constant fear they live with would vanish and my brothers and sisters will make sure they have a comfortable home and a good future."