In 1986, al-Mabhouh was arrested by Israeli security services for possessing a stolen IDF M16 assault rifle. When he was released from prison he joined the ranks of the nascent Hamas. As a man whose knuckles had already been bloodied, he became one of the early commanders of the group’s military wing. Al-Mabhouh commanded a highly secretive squad called Unit 101,* whose sole mission was the kidnapping and murder of Israeli soldiers.5
Sergeant Avi Sasportas was the first of al-Mabhouh’s victims. The twenty-one-year-old served in the elite Maglan special operations airborne unit and had been outside of Gaza on February 16, 1989, trying to hitch a ride back home, as was common for Israeli soldiers traveling throughout the country. The vehicle he entered, a white Subaru, was driven by a man dressed as an Orthodox Jew; there were other men in the car, as well. Sasportas was never seen alive again. He was beaten to death near the Gaza Strip and his body buried in a nondescript grave discovered months later.
On the evening of May 3, 1989, a Hamas team, masquerading as Orthodox Jews, kidnapped nineteen-year-old Corporal Ilan Saadon, as he hitchhiked with a friend at Masmiya Junction, west of the port city of Ashdod. There was room in the car for only one, so Saadon got in, hoping to get to his home located nearby in Ashqelon; his mother was waiting for him with dinner.
The Hamas abduction squad intended to take their captive to the Jebalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip and demand a prisoner exchange with Israel, but the terrorists panicked. The terrorist in the front passenger seat turned around and fired a round at point-blank range into Saadon’s head, killing the teenage soldier instantly.
The Shin Bet and the IDF searched every nook and cranny of the Gaza Strip for Saadon, turning the 140 square miles of densely populated neighborhoods and refugee camps inside out. The security forces arrested two hundred members of Hamas. Shin Bet and military intelligence officers assigned to the Gaza Strip were desperate—if the corporal was alive, the veteran specialists knew, then every second was precious in order to gather the information the special operations units would need to attempt a rescue. If Saadon was dead, the intelligence agents wanted to locate the soldier’s body so that his parents, and the country, could have closure. The clock ticked and no information was forthcoming. “We did everything we could to find the kidnapped soldier,” a former Border Guard policeman who was stationed in Gaza remembers. “We tore the place apart and we know that the bastards knew where he was, but they took pleasure in not telling us. We kept on thinking of Ilan’s mother. It was all very cruel.”6
Cruelty was part of the equation—barbarity was a calling card of the Hamas campaign against Israel. The two soldiers weren’t only murdered but mutilated. “The soldiers were already dead, and what the terrorists did to them was too depraved to even imagine,” the Border Guard officer remembered. “It displayed an inhumanity that we couldn’t fathom.”7 According to Ronen Bergman, an investigative reporter for the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot, al-Mabhouh and a coconspirator took photographs of themselves stomping on the corpses.8
The Hamas leadership gave strict orders to its members to remain tight-lipped about Saadon’s fate. Only a handful of Hamas commanders were privy to the location of his grave and, when questioned by the Israelis, those men were not forthcoming with any information that would enable Saadon’s family to bury their son. Ilan Saadon’s body was recovered only in 1996. He was buried with full military honors.
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was one of the Hamas leaders apprehended in the Israeli dragnet. He was charged with Saadon’s abduction and murder for issuing the orders to al-Mabhouh to kidnap Israeli soldiers. Yassin’s orders were part of a series of opening salvos to launch a war that Hamas hoped would vanquish Israel and establish an Islamic state in all of Palestine. But he soon found himself in the prisoner’s dock, surrounded by Israeli military policemen, charged with two murders and a dozen other terrorist charges. He was convicted of the two abductions and murders and sentenced to two life terms in a maximum security prison.*
The Sasportas and Saadon abductions elevated al-Mabhouh in the eyes of the Hamas hierarchy. It was just the type of audacious and cold-blooded act that rank-and-file Hamas adored. Al-Mabhouh had been one of the men dressed as a pious Jew and had been personally involved in both murders. It was al-Mabhouh who shot Saadon in the face.9 The Shin Bet never caught up with al-Mabhouh, however. He managed to evade capture in 1989. He was able to slink his way out of the Gaza Strip through Rafah, a border town connected to the Sinai Desert. The fugitive trekked across the desert and dodged the watchful eyes of Egyptian intelligence. He made it across Egypt and into Libya, eventually finding a temporary respite and safe haven in Algeria. From Algiers al-Mabhouh traveled to the Sudan. In his new life he now shuttled back and forth between Khartoum and Hamas headquarters in Damascus, becoming one of the most important men in the organization.
Despite his murderous past, al-Mabhouh developed into something of a technocrat inside Hamas. He became a budget and supply man. He helped negotiate the funds that Iran and Hezbollah earmarked for Hamas, and he devised plans to smuggle the funds and the weapons of war it bought into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Al-Mabhouh was involved in arms shipments and negotiating deals with Sinai arms merchants and shipping companies that could be bribed to ferry a load of combustible contraband. “He was part accountant, part purchasing agent, part arbitrator, part facilitator, and part banker,” a former member of Harpoon commented. “Money went into one of his hands, and death came out of the other.”10
An influx of Iranian-financed weapons would have been a game changer. On January 3, 2002, for example, the IDF/Navy launched Operation Noah’s Ark, the interdiction of the Karine-A, a Tonga-registered freighter that had sailed from the Persian Gulf to the Sudan and then toward the Red Sea with a cargo hold of weapons destined for Yasir Arafat. Israeli naval commandos from Flotilla 13 seized the ship in open waters and diverted it to the port of Eilat, where military intelligence specialists found tons of weapons ranging from wire-guided antitank missiles to mortars and small arms; the ship carried two and a half tons of military-grade high explosives. The Karine-A transported weapons worth more than $15 million.
Part of the Karine-A’s cargo included short-range rockets. Hamas, especially after Israel’s 2005 unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, realized that it could no longer engage Israeli forces with the up-close-and-personal impact of suicide bombers. The Palestinian terrorists, like Hezbollah in 2006, would need to develop short-, medium-, and long-range capability that would be both inexpensive and easy to use. The responsibility of building such an arsenal for Hamas fell upon al-Mabhouh’s shoulders. He managed much of the money that Iran and Hezbollah earmarked for the organization. But in most cases that al-Mabhouh handled, the currency wasn’t dollars but rather sniper rifles and hand grenades. Instead, he was the man who coordinated arms acquisition and facilitated the shipments, sometimes through the Persian Gulf and other times even through smuggling routes established in the Sudan.11
Following the Hamas Gaza coup against Fatah and the Palestinian Authority in June 2007, Iran was determined to change the battlefield equation and establish a foothold on Israel’s southern border to complement its base of operations across Israel’s northern frontier. Tehran knew from Hezbollah’s success in the 2006 War that this game-changing push relied on indiscriminately launched rockets that could deliver lethal fusillades against Israeli cities. The rockets, in most cases, were fire-and-forget crude tubes constructed in local workshops that were pointed in the direction of an Israeli town or city and then launched. The know-how to construct these rockets came from outside the Strip; the tools and explosive charges to fit inside the rocket warheads were smuggled into Gaza through an endless highway of smuggler tunnels dug deep beneath the border between Rafah and the Egyptian frontier. Sinai arms merchants made a fast and furious fortune delivering war supplies and cash to Hamas.
Hamas and the PIJ launched approximately 2,700 rockets against Israel’s cities between 2005 and
2007. Throughout southern Israel an air raid siren would sound and then, seconds later, an explosion would follow. The Hamas rockets, called Qassams, were crude and inaccurate. Sometimes the missiles would fall harmlessly into a field. Other times, the rockets would fall on apartment blocks, inside schoolyards, and in hospitals.
The southern Israeli town of Sderot was particularly hard hit. Close to the Gaza Strip, the residents of Sderot lived an intolerable existence of racing to fallout shelters. Several civilians were killed; scores were wounded. The IDF responded with artillery fire. A tense and unbearable state of conflict ensued. The rocket fire ultimately resulted in 2009’s Operation Cast Lead, an IDF incursion into the Gaza Strip.
Ella Abukasis was seventeen years old when she was walking with her fifteen-year-old brother on the night of January 1, 2005, in Sderot. It was Saturday night, and the alarm of incoming rockets, the “red alert,” sounded a warning that a rocket had been fired from Gaza. In Tel Aviv one has ninety seconds to find his way to a shelter. In the port city of Ashdod, less than twenty miles from the Gaza Strip, one has only sixty seconds to seek shelter from the incoming rockets. In Sderot, a small desert town half a mile from the Hamas enclave, one has only fifteen seconds to find a shelter.
Ella and her brother, Tamir, were walking down a barren street when the alarm sounded. There was no bus stop to race to, no nearby buildings to hide beneath; there were no nearby parked cars to hide under. All that raced through Ella’s mind was to protect her brother. She threw Tamir to the ground and covered him with her body. They were in the middle of the road when the missile launched from Gaza exploded near both their heads. The blast sent shrapnel and nails slicing into their young bodies. Ella fought for seven days before succumbing to her wounds. Tamir survived his injuries, but remains disabled for life.
Both Hamas and Iran were determined to expose Israeli vulnerability far beyond towns like Sderot that bordered Gaza. Hamas and Iran wanted to hit the strategic port city of Ashdod as well as Israel’s major population centers around the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. The missile arsenal they assembled was diverse and lethal: the Qassam 1 rocket, with a warhead weighing a pound, had a range of two and a half miles; the Qassam 2 rocket had a range of just over six miles and yielded a warhead of nearly five pounds; the Qassam 3 carried a warhead of more than thirty pounds with a range of seven and a half miles; and the Grad rocket carried a warhead packed with forty pounds of high explosives and had a range of nearly thirteen miles from launch. The Iranian-financed weaponry was a make-or-break component of this deterrence power for Hamas.12 Al-Mabhouh’s smuggling operations from Iran to Sudan, and then from Sudan to Sinai and underground into Gaza, were the lifelines of this endeavor.
But what made the Israeli intelligence community particularly nervous was the development of an Iranian-designed missile called the Fajr. The Fajr, “dawn” in Farsi, was a long-range ballistic missile by Arab-Israeli standards. With a reach of nearly forty-seven miles and a payload of two hundred pounds of military-grade explosive, the missile could hit Tel Aviv and the capital Jerusalem; Ben-Gurion International Airport, Israel’s lifeline to the outside world, was in range of this fairly advanced rocket. Components of the missile were, according to reports, manufactured in Iran or developed, under a loose license, in concealed factories in and around the Sudanese capital or close to the water so that shipment to Sinai would be easily facilitated. Like one giant Lego puzzle, the rocket components were then smuggled across the desert, underneath the Egyptian border, and brought into Gaza where they were assembled in makeshift factories—some of which were underground.
The Sudanese element of al-Mabhouh’s operation was particularly troubling to Harpoon and the Mossad, because it was so far from Israel’s frontiers and because the complicated system had to be built by educated and experienced technicians, and they were in short supply in Gaza.13 In January and February 2009, Israeli warplanes attacked trucks that were transporting Fajr-3 rockets, which had been brought by Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps to Port Sudan and then handed off to smuggling gangs who would ready the rockets for transport to Sinai. The Israeli F-15 and F-16 fighter bombers flew more than eight hundred miles to hit their targets.14
The entire endeavor, tunnels and all, consumed an inordinate percentage of the money that Iran budgeted toward Hamas. Al-Mabhouh watched over how these funds were allocated and spent. He had great skill as a logistician. It made him a lethal foe. It made him a legitimate target.
There was, according to reports, an attempt to assassinate al-Mabhouh when he traveled to Dubai on official business in November 2009. Israeli intelligence had managed to insert a Trojan horse into al-Mabhouh’s laptop and monitored all of his transactions and his many movements.15 A Mossad operation was immediately launched. Reports indicate a Mossad hit team met al-Mabhouh at a five-star hotel in the city and even succeeded in slipping the Hamas commander a toxin into a cocktail he was drinking. The Hamas official drank the poisoned beverage, but much to the Mossad’s surprise, he wasn’t killed by the agent. It just made him very sick.16 The opportunity had been lost.
Two months passed until al-Mabhouh’s next trip. This time, the Mossad learned that his final destination was China. Al-Mabhouh, once again, would be spending a few days in Dubai. Dagan, according to reports, proposed an intricate operation terminating the Hamas commander in the Emirati city. Prime Minister Netanyahu, who succeeded Ehud Olmert on March 31, 2009, gave his Mossad director the green light to proceed.17
Dubai, one of the seven emirates that constitute the United Arab Emirates, is one of the most dazzling and lavish city-states in the world. The city-state’s skyline is science-fiction-like, boasting the tallest building in the world and more luxury cars on the smoothly paved roads than there are camels in its outlying desert. Dubai is a remarkable experiment in free-wheeling economics in a region where a bomb under one’s car is usually the currency of day-to-day existence. Dubai was supposed to be a neutral city—a bastion of commerce and pleasure that was off-limits to the violence of the region. It was strictly forbidden for the Iranians, the Saudis, the Arabs, and the Israelis to use the city-state as a battlefield for their own petty little wars and disagreements. The Jihaz amn a-Dawleh, or State Security Service, the UAE’s intelligence agency, went to great lengths, in bilateral meetings and in covert sit-downs, to make sure that the regional players knew and respected the rules. State Security, of course, encouraged the warring factions to conduct business in Dubai. The hotels and restaurants were more than enough reason for the spies to conduct their affairs there.
Only Iran and Hamas ignored the pleas to keep the city clean from nefarious players. But by 2010 the global real estate bubble implosion had hit Dubai. The sheen of gold and platinum was threatened by overpriced properties that were abandoned and underwater. Dubai’s economy was in a nose dive. The Iranians stepped in. They used the vacated office complexes as convenient addresses from where to set up shell companies to skirt Israeli-urged and Western-led economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic over its nuclear ambitions.18 UAE State Security was incensed by Iran’s ambivalence toward the unwritten rule, but the small intelligence service was wary about angering Tehran to the point of Hezbollah operatives being unleashed inside the malls and luxury hotels.
One of the lures of Dubai—to friendly spies using the emirate as a meeting ground and for more suspect operatives with less than honorable intentions—was that it was so accessible. Dubai International Airport was a marvel of size, scope, and shopping. In 2009, 40 million people flew in and out of Dubai; 140 airlines serviced the city. Emirates, the city-state’s airline, had gone from a small regional connector to one of the largest intercontinental carriers in the world.
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh booked his own travel from Damascus to Dubai. He used a credit card in his own name and booked a ticket on the Emirates Airline website. Al-Mabhouh was senior enough in the organization to have a complement of bodyguards who traveled with him at all times, but the flight from the Sy
rian capital to Dubai was nearly sold out. Apparently the Hamas commander thought it more important to secure a ticket for the flight rather than wait for a later one that would have seats for his security detail. Al-Mabhouh abandoned many protocols of survival tradecraft. Unlike the top leaders of Hamas, he didn’t utilize charter services, where a Gulfstream and a crew of pretty flight attendants were at a warlord’s beck and call.
The ticket al-Mabhouh purchased, Emirates Airlines flight 912, departed Damascus on January 19 at 10:05 AM. EK912 was the daily morning flight to Dubai—one that made sure its passengers could be in their hotel lounges for afternoon cocktails. The alcohol always flowed in Dubai. Al-Mabhouh’s security detail would have to meet their principal in UAE the following day. They’d be forced to fly on SyrianAir, an airline without the charm or style of Emirates, but one that allowed them to carry their sidearms on the plane.
On the morning of January 19, 2010, a car picked al-Mabhouh up from his Kfar Sousah home in Damascus to drive him to the airport. The neighborhood was the exclusive section of the Syrian capital reserved for Palestinian and Lebanese militants and friends of the ruling Assad regime. Syrian intelligence agents at the airport took care of the check-in process for al-Mabhouh; such VIP respect was customary. He had five fake passports at his disposal. For this trip he used an Iraqi travel document in the name of Mahmoud Abdul Raouf Mohammed; some reports claimed he used a forged Palestinian travel document.
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