Blow the House Down

by Robert Baer

  The father was probably lying, but I couldn’t blame him. He was just being cautious. Nabil had a friend in Hamas who talked with his own father by phone nearly every day. Israeli intelligence didn’t know where the son was hiding, but they did know which part of Gaza he’d gone to ground in. So they arranged to have phone service cut off for that area, then convinced an informant to carry an explosive-trapped cell phone to the son. The phone rang, the informant answered, and he handed it to the son, telling him it was his father. The son couldn’t resist: “Daddy, is that you?” Instantly, the Israelis detonated the phone over the signal, peeling half the son’s head away.

  “Maybe I could find him through a friend,” I offered. “One of them must know where he is.”

  The father looked at me as if I were some sort of improbable daydreamer.

  “They’re all dead or in jail,” he said.

  “Surely there must be one.”

  “No.”

  “Wasn’t there a boy from Salfit that Nabil almost got arrested with?” I said. I’d read about him in an intelligence report. “They were friends.”

  “Hassan Saleh? He’s in Bir Shiva. He’ll never get out. And you’ll never be allowed to see him.”

  He was right about not getting out. Saleh was serving a life sentence for organizing a pair of suicide bombings in Jerusalem and one in Haifa. Bir Shiva prison was where Israel housed its “national security” prisoners, the Hamas and Islamic suicide bombing networks.

  “Let me try,” I said. “If I see Nabil, can I give him a note from you?”

  The father looked at me for a moment and then called his wife. They went off in the corner of the garden and had an animated conversation, then came back and sat down. The father asked me for a piece of paper and wrote a one-page letter to Nabil. He handed it to his wife so she could read it. She folded it up and gave it to me. They must have decided writing a note to their son wasn’t going to make it any easier for the Israelis to find him.

  Before I left I pulled out a disposable camera I’d bought at Larnaca Airport and took a picture of them for their son. It was the first time they smiled since I’d arrived.

  CHAPTER 23

  Bir Shiva, Israel

  A BLAST OF WIND roared off the Negev desert just as I exited the taxi in front of Bir Shiva prison. Plastic trash bags were plastered against the outer chain-link fence and the rolls of razor wire that topped it. The sun was almost blocked out by the swirling sand. A hundred feet south of the prison I could just make out a Bedouin encampment, camels and all.

  The guard in the booth at the outer perimeter was on the phone talking. I pounded on the door to get his attention, waving a letter from the Israeli Prison System. He slid open the window, took it, and called someone on his walkie-talkie.

  “Wait,” he told me, pointing to an open shed covered by a tin roof.

  Peri, my retired Shin Bet friend who had arranged the letter for me, advised me not to bother going to see Hassan Saleh. An unrepentant mass murderer, he wasn’t going to tell me anything useful.

  “I can make him sit down with you, but that’s all,” Peri said.

  I didn’t really have any other choice. It was the only name Nabil’s father gave me. The rest of Nabil’s group was either dead or, like Nabil, on the run.

  “He’ll never say a word,” Peri insisted. “Don’t waste your time.”

  Peri didn’t need to say it, but I knew he was also nervous about being the one who was getting me into Wing Six. Leftist journalists, especially the Scandinavians, were known for passing messages from inmates to the outside. If the prison officials suspected that’s what I was doing, I’d wind up in a cell myself.

  I shared the waiting shed with a Palestinian family who looked as if they’d been there for days. At noon, when the sandstorm finally seemed to pass, the old lady opened a satchel of partially burnt wood and charcoal and prepared tea. She saw me watching and prepared a cup for me. By the time the tea was ready, the wind had picked up again.

  We huddled together in the shed, barely able to hear one another over the wind. The woman told me she was there to visit her son, who was doing three years for theft. When I told her I was waiting to see someone in Wing Six, I’m sure she thought I was lying or crazy. No visitor ever got to see the prisoners in Wing Six, including parents. Prisoners weren’t allowed to make or receive phone calls, either.

  More than an hour later the Israeli guard walked over to the shed and crooked a finger my way: “Mr. Arends, you can go in.”

  At the main guardhouse they took everything: cell phone, keys, belts, even my Bic pen, giving me one of theirs for the interview. The guard let me take in my yellow eighty-by-eleven pad after he fanned it to make sure nothing was in it. Fortunately, I had the photo of Muhammad Shahadah and his wife and their letter to Nabil in my pocket.

  The guard waved me into an air lock. After the door closed behind me, the one in front clicked open and a voice came over the loudspeaker in German telling me to come through. On the other side, I walked through a metal detector and then an organic strip searcher, which detects explosives secreted on the body.

  I felt as if I was about to enter the Death Star and come face-to-face with Darth Vader. Instead, a striking, petite woman in a sky-blue prison-guard uniform met me on the other side. She looked Moroccan. We walked side by side, not saying a word, until we came to a two-story blue pastel building surrounded by rolls of razor wire and an electrified fence. Wing Six.

  The woman and I waited silently in Wing Six’s air lock for another five minutes while they locked down the prisoners. A guard then led me out into the prison exercise yard while my escort stayed behind. A thick metal screen and razor wire covered the yard. No Hollywood helicopter rescues from this place.

  A minute later Hassan Saleh appeared, shackles on his legs, cuffed from behind. The guards pushed him through into the exercise area, then waited while Hassan turned his back so his shackles could be removed through two holes in the bottom of the door. Freed for the moment, he walked over and sat down in the chair next to mine. He didn’t offer his hand or say a word.

  Saleh was a small man with small hands. His prison uniform hung on him loosely. His green eyes, the color of antifreeze, were fixed on mine. Both of his hands were badly burned, no doubt from chemicals.

  I started by telling him I was doing a profile on him for Der Spiegel, the German weekly. I could have told him I was writing an article on floor waxes for Good Housekeeping for all the reaction I got. I hadn’t expected this guy to be a complete mute. My experience had been that prisoners locked down for three years welcomed conversation with a stranger, even with a journalist. Not this one.

  I threw out a couple banal questions, like were the prisoners treated well, was the food okay, did the guards speak Arabic. The more I willed him to respond, the harder Saleh studied the mesh wire above us. Finally, I pulled out the picture of Nabil’s father and mother and nudged Saleh with my foot. “Look at this.”

  Nabil’s father had told me he’d known Saleh from when he was a child. Saleh had played with Nabil in Nabil’s parents’ living room. When Saleh was arrested, Nabil’s father had gone to Saleh’s parents’ house to offer his sympathy.

  Saleh took the picture from me and stared at it. He then looked back up at me.

  “Your brother graduated from high school two weeks ago,” I said, another piece of information I’d gotten from Nabil’s father. He told me Saleh and his brother were very close. “He’s doing fine. He’ll be at the university this year.”

  Saleh now blinked. “What do you want?” he said, speaking for the first time.

  “Let me ask you what you want. Would you like me to call your brother and tell him you’re okay?”

  “You know what they do here? They steal your time. But we do just the same. We read. We recite the Koran. We strengthen our faith. We steal our time back. I’m not just okay, I’m at peace.”

  I noticed the guard was pacing impatiently back and forth on the oth
er side of the mesh wire watching us, no doubt surprised I’d gotten Saleh to talk.

  “Do you want me to call your brother or not?”

  Saleh didn’t answer.

  “I already have his phone number.”

  Saleh looked over at the guard, leaned closer to me, and whispered in my ear. “Okay. In two days it’s his birthday. Wish him happy birthday.”

  “I will. Now a question you won’t like. How do I find Nabil Shahadah?”

  Saleh stood up abruptly and motioned to the guard that he wanted to go back to his cell.

  As the guard started to unbolt the metal door to the exercise yard, I held the picture of Nabil’s parents up to his face.

  “I saw them yesterday,” I said. “They haven’t talked to Nabil in three years. Are you telling me you don’t care whether Nabil gets the picture or not?”

  “I don’t know who Nabil Shahadah is.”

  I pulled out the letter Nabil’s parents had written from my pocket and handed it to Saleh.

  As Saleh read it, he shifted from foot to foot, no longer calm. The guard was now in the exercise yard walking toward us.

  “Let me write my parents’ telephone number,” he said, grabbing my eighty-by-eleven pad. He quickly wrote something and then handed the pad back.

  The guard led him away as I read what he’d written: Gaza. Beach Camp. Port Video.

  CHAPTER 24

  Gaza City, Gaza

  ONE PALESTINIAN REFUGEE CAMP looks pretty much like another: unfinished cinder-block houses intersected by dirt roads, mounds of rotting trash, posters of suicide bombers pasted on the walls. But the Gaza Strip’s Beach Camp is different—narrower streets, more rubble, more menacing. Although the Israelis regularly hit the place with drones and F-16’s, Israeli assassination teams stayed clear of it. It was too dangerous.

  I walked up and down the Beach Camp’s main street, looking for the Port Video, but it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Either it never existed or it was long gone. Back on the coast road, I found a man in his sixties, manning a vegetable cart. He thought about it, rubbing his chin, and then pointed at an abandoned building three houses back along the road I’d just come down. “Maybe it was there, I think,” he said. “It closed a long time ago.”

  I went back up and had a look, but there was nothing to show it had ever been a video store or anything else. Rebars stuck out of the unfinished third floor, waiting for an addition that there would never be enough money for. I kept having the feeling I’d wandered onto a Becket stage set.

  Across the street, I noticed a gaunt kid in a ripped Che Guevara T-shirt and military fatigue pants, maybe all of fourteen, toothpick arms folded across his chest. He was leaning against a wall, watching me.

  I walked over to him. “Do you know where I can find Nabil Shahadah?”

  Instead of answering, the kid pushed himself off the wall, sauntered a few steps down the pitted mud road, and disappeared into the interior of the camp. I waited ten minutes but he never came back.

  Saleh had lied to me so I’d go away, I figured. It was that simple: a video store that wasn’t a video store for the journalist who wasn’t a journalist. But maybe it was more than that. Maybe I was being set up. The obvious next move was to head back to my hotel and get back into Israel as fast as I could. Instead, I decided to make another attempt to find Nabil in the morning.

  It was too humid to sleep. The electricity was off. There was no breeze. Only the mosquitos were stirring. For company, I had a late wedding party outside my window. Around one in the morning I gave up on sleep altogether and went out for a walk, south along the road toward Gaza’s fishing port. I was nearly out the door before I remembered to grab my pad and photos. Never, ever leave anything in a hotel room.

  It was better walking along the beach. There was a puff of a breeze off the water. Thousands of lights twinkled offshore—fishing boats—none of them more than two miles out because of the Israeli blockade. I was a hundred yards down from the hotel when I noticed someone following me. I crossed the street diagonally and caught a glimpse of him: the kid with the toothpick arms from that afternoon. He followed me across the street, gaining on me.

  “Come,” he said in English.

  He turned away from the beach road into a poor neighborhood. I followed him through a maze of cardboard shacks, sheet-metal lean-tos, and more rough cinder-block houses with open sewers running beside them. We came to a trash dump watched by two Fedayeen in fatigues, sitting in the back of a Toyota pickup with a .30-caliber, belt-fed machine gun cradled between their knees.

  The kid left me there, just turned and seemed to disappear through one of the cinder-block walls that ran alongside the dump. The humidity and stench had my stomach roiling. Happily, I’d eaten almost nothing that day.

  One of the Fedayeen motioned me to an old Toyota Land Cruiser, indicating I was to get into the backseat. The other Fedayeen got in with me, forced me on the floor, and threw a blanket over me.

  We drove around for a full hour, cutting through back streets, onto an open highway, and then across a washboard dirt road. At one point, the Toyota bottomed out over what felt like a trench, slamming me hard against the floor.

  When we eventually stopped, someone pulled me roughly out of the back, pushed me against the side of the car, and yanked the eight-by-eleven pad and photos out of my hand. Two new Fedayeen, faces covered with kafiyahs, walked up to us. The taller was carrying a stubby AK with a grenade launcher under the barrel. The short one grabbed me by the arm and led me down a couple of narrowing alleys and through the ground floors of two plywood houses until we came to a house that had been used as an abattoir, and not long ago. Dried blood covered the walls and ran across the floor into the alley. There were no windows. The minute the Fedayeen closed the door behind me, I was cast into pitch black.

  I stood there I don’t know how long—I was afraid to even sit down—until a grinding noise started up outside, as if something large were chewing on the corner of our bunker-building. With that, the taller of the two most recent Palestinian escorts came through the door with a hand metal detector. He waved it over me, looking for a beacon or transponder. Satisfied, he signaled for me to follow him.

  The room I was led into was darkened, except for a television. In the glow of the screen, I could see a man sitting in a plastic lawn chair. He was alone.

  A video was playing—jerky, grainy footage taken by a handheld camera. I could hear the cameraman talk to someone behind him, telling him to be patient. “He will be here soon,” he said. It looked like Gaza, with the fence and the guard tower of a settlement in one corner of the frame.

  A bus appeared out of the lower left of the picture, bumping along a gravel road, throwing up plumes of dust. A couple seconds behind it came a Pajero, gaining on the bus. The camera panned left, following the bus to what was now clearly a Jewish settlement surrounded by razor wire. The Pajero inexplicably slowed, and the bus passed through the gates of the settlement.

  “This is where he loses his faith,” the man sitting in the chair said. “But not for long. Watch.”

  The Pajero swung around to the main road, turned right, and picked up speed fast. Just for a moment, you could see the face of the driver—a boy, his head barely above the window. You couldn’t see where he was headed until the cameraman panned right and picked up an Israeli military jeep, mesh over the windows, a long whip antenna. The jeep suddenly stopped, the doors flew open, and two Israeli soldiers started to sprint away from the jeep. The Pajero was maybe ten yards away from the jeep when it exploded, sending plumes of dust and rocks in all directions. Seconds later the two Israeli soldiers ran out of the cloud of debris, sandblasted but alive.

  The man switched off the TV and turned on the table light next to him. It was Nabil Shahadah. A dozen years older, but I recognized him from the Peshawar photo.

  Nabil was a small man, still rail thin with unruly hair and a great hedge of a mustache that looked to be dyed jet-black. His body, though
, couldn’t hide the hard years on the run. A wound or maybe arthritis had taken over his knees. He grunted, pushed himself to his feet, and walked stiff-legged over to the hot plate in the corner to turn on the gas burner to make coffee. He worked silently until the coffee was ready, then carried a cup over to me and settled down again with his own.

  “The target was the bus, wasn’t it?” I asked.

  Nabil nodded.

  “It looked like there were children on it.”

  “There were,” he said, bristling. “Do Israeli F-16’s differentiate between children and our martyrs?”

  I knew I had to let it go. That’s not what I’d come for. Still, I was curious. During the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranian suicide bombers hit only military targets. In Lebanon in the eighties, it was the same thing—military targets only. Then Nabil and Hamas changed the rules when they started targeting buses. It was now slaughter for slaughter’s sake, a pornography of violence.

  “Why did you want to see me?” he asked. “The Israelis couldn’t have sent you. They’re not that dumb.”

  “Give me back my stuff. I want to show you something.”

  Nabil yelled at the darkened doorway. When one of the Fedayeen came in, Nabil whispered in his ear and sent him off. The Fedayeen was back in two minutes. I handed Nabil the photo of his parents and the letter.

  “I saw your parents two days ago. I took their picture. But I’m not going to lie to you that I came here for that. I need you to help me find someone.”

  I probably imagined it, but Nabil looked as if he was softening, holding the picture of his mother and father.

  “What is it you want?” he asked, turning back to me.

  I pulled out the Peshawar photo and handed it to him. He looked surprised. I could tell he’d never seen it before, probably even forgotten he’d been photographed that day. For Nabil, Peshawar must have been a lifetime ago.

  “You’re standing on the far right,” I said. “The man I am looking for is on the far left. The slight guy with the fine features. I’m pretty sure he’s Iranian. Maybe a Pasdaran officer.”