Deal 'em! After all, it seems everybody's doing it. First it was the U.S. military, then an Israeli newspaper, now Palestinian militants.

Putting the faces of your enemies on playing cards has become the parlor game for the global war on terror. Whether the illustrated cards have helped U.S. soldiers identify and round up key members of Saddam's regime is a matter of conjecture.

But one thing is certain: the Saddam playing cards have been an enormous public relations success, even as the rest of the U.S. war effort bogs down. Open the newspaper, click to the Web site, or flip on the television and see the deck of 55 Iraqi fugitives shrink.

Two weeks ago, when editors at Ma'ariv, Israel's second-largest circulation daily, were faced with public outrage over yet another bus bombing and the government's stepped-up campaign to wipe out Palestinian militant groups, they turned stateside for inspiration.

"In the past, we used to just lay out the lists of [wanted militants] on the page just as photographs, but since the Americans came up with this gimmick in Iraq, it was something that came to mind," Arik Bachar, Ma'ariv's foreign editor, said by telephone from the paper's offices in Tel Aviv.

The resulting full-page spread hit Israel's newsstands on Aug. 22. Under the headline "Kingdom of Terror" were 34 playing cards, each adorned with the face of a Palestinian militant whose name had been supplied by Israeli security officials. The joker was Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and the ace of hearts was Hamas founder and spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin. The face of Ismael Abu Shanab, a senior Hamas official, was crossed out in red -- Israeli forces had killed him the day before in a missile attack in the Gaza Strip.

Three days later, the newspaper used the design again to report the killing of another suspected militant. As Israeli forces step up their targeted killings of alleged Palestinian militants, Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, has denied local media reports that playing cards with the faces of militants have been distributed to Israeli solders. Still, the fad has caught on.

Not to be outdone, a pro-Palestinian Web site operated by a group calling itself the Palestine Information Center followed suit last week, showing playing cards framing the faces of 16 current and former Israeli officials, set against the provocative background of a burning bus. In this Palestinian version, Sharon is the joker, and his image is placed between the barrels of two rifles aimed by two masked fighters with their tell-tale green Hamas headbands.

The display sparked a furor in the Israeli media, with one leading newspaper reporting that Hamas had distributed a poster-size version of the playing cards in several cities in the Palestinian territories. Six Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip interviewed for this story said they had not seen the placard.

Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, a senior Hamas official, denied Tuesday that his group was behind the display. Al-Rantisi, the target of a failed Israeli missile strike in the Gaza Strip in June, is the ace of diamonds in Ma'ariv's deck of cards.

Bachar, the Ma'ariv editor, acknowledges that the success of the illustrated playing cards -- at least their novelty -- has spawned imitations and that it may not be long before America's foes in Iraq devise their own deck of cards. But he doesn't worry that the cards put an overly playful gloss on war, least of all the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"I don't think anything can trivialize this war. This is a real nasty war with lots of people getting killed in a gruesome fashion," he said. Nor is Bachar concerned that the motif, by putting a sporting face on fighting, is an incitement to violence in a conflict that has dragged on for 35 months and killed at least 2,429 Palestinians and 827 Israelis. "In this kind of situation, you never know what causes what. There was nothing new but the presentation. I wouldn't have thought this itself would incite."
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