At the time, the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza was seen mainly as a social movement, devoid of political ambitions. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, that was largely accurate. But then Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the shah in Iran. A religious scholar, pious and holy, had led a revolution, raised an army, and instituted a functioning government. He demonstrated to Muslims everywhere, not only to Shiites like him, that Islam was not only a religion, constrained to sermons in mosques and charity in the streets, but also an instrument of political and military power—that Islam could be a governing ideology, that Islam was the solution for everything.
In the Palestinian territories, preachers’ tones began to change. “The apologetics that had characterized Islam began to disappear,” said Yuval Diskin, who became head of the Shin Bet in 2005 and who’d spent most of his career as an intelligence operative acting deep inside the Palestinian population. “The passivity and the waiting for the long process of preparing people’s hearts for ‘salvation’ gave way to activism and preaching for struggle, for jihad. From humble doormats, they turned into very energetic activists. It happened here in Gaza as well as across the entire Middle East and Africa. They were on a higher personal level and were more ideologically dedicated than the PLO folks, and their need-to-know compartmentalization capability was infinitely better than anything we’d seen. Neither we nor the rest of the Western world saw these processes in real time.”
Yassin was one of the early adapters, which the Shin Bet discovered quite by accident in April 1984. One day, a young Palestinian activist was detained in Gaza on suspicion of involvement in acts of terrorism sponsored by Fatah. He was taken to a spare interrogation room, where he was questioned by the Shin Bet interrogator Micha Kubi (the same man who had questioned the two terrorists who hijacked the Ashkelon bus just before they were murdered by the Shin Bet, and who refused to lie about the incident later on).
The suspect was talking, giving up snippets of information, but Kubi sensed he was holding something back, a secret too important to tell. Kubi leaned forward, as if to whisper something in the Palestinian’s ear. Then he swung his huge arm, his hand rising swiftly from his hip, and gave an open palm slap to the man’s face, knocking him off his chair and into the wall. “I don’t want to hear all the garbage that you’re telling me!” Kubi yelled in Arabic. “Now, start giving me the really serious stuff, or else you don’t leave here alive today.”
That was all the prompting the man needed. The interrogation soon revealed that Sheikh Yassin was operating under the orders of the extreme wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, whose leader was a Palestinian, Abdallah Azam. At the time, Azam was also active in Peshawar, a large city in northwestern Pakistan, where he had met a member of a wealthy family of Saudi Arabian building contractors and persuaded him to adopt the same militant jihadist ideology. The rich Saudi began using his family’s money to finance the organization and support networks of fanatical Islamists, some of them graduates of the training camps the CIA was running in Afghanistan as a proxy force against the occupying Soviets. The man’s name was Osama bin Laden.
Azam’s men in Jordan had been sending money that they obtained from wealthy individuals in Jordan and Saudi Arabia to Yassin, who used it to set up armed cells, preparing to launch a jihad against Israel. Thanks to the information supplied by the interrogated Palestinian, the Israeli authorities arrested Yassin and began rounding up his closest associates. The most important of those men was Salah Shehade, a social worker by profession, educated and astute. Thanks to Yassin, he had become a devout Muslim and eventually his mentor’s chief aide, in charge of the organization’s clandestine activities.
Shin Bet personnel, angry at having been deceived by the sheikh and his men, subjected their prisoners to very harsh treatment. The first to break was Shehade, who was badly beaten, deprived of sleep, and starved. Shehade suffered from claustrophobia, and the Shin Bet took advantage of this, locking him up—blindfolded, and with his hands and feet bound—in a cellar and then playing tapes of the sounds made by rats and roaches. He begged to be taken out, and when he was, Kubi was waiting for him.
Kubi told Shehade he could eat in exchange for information. Shehade, exhausted and hungry, agreed, on the condition that Kubi wouldn’t reveal that he’d been the first to talk.
The next to break was Yassin himself, though no physical means were used against him. The Shin Bet interrogator Aristo handled the questioning. Aristo said:
We knew, from the weeks of surveillance of his home, that a female admirer of Sheikh Yassin, a respectable married woman, came to visit him now and again, and that out of her admiration for him and her desire to make his difficult life more pleasant, she’d get into bed with him. During one questioning session, I leaned over him and whispered in his ear, “I know all about you. I know what you speak about with the people who are closest to you. I know who comes to visit you and when. I know when you get a hard-on and when you don’t.”
I did not mention the woman, but he knew exactly what I was getting at, and right away he rethought his situation. He saw that he had no choice, that if he didn’t speak up and give us the correct details, we’d spread the story about the woman and place him in a very embarrassing situation.
Fear of public humiliation proved to be a reliable tactic. Another senior prisoner was made to undress and stand naked, facing the interrogators, for hours. They saw that he had an abnormally small penis, and out of fear that they would spread word around, he began to talk as well.
From the interrogations, it became clear that Yassin had been preparing for violent jihad for a long time. Since 1981, he’d ordered his men to break into IDF bases and steal arms and ammunition, and they had accumulated a large amount of weaponry. Altogether, forty-four firearms were located, the organization’s first arsenal.
Yassin, the investigation revealed, had secretly set up a small military unit under the command of Salah Shehade. This unit consisted of two separate parts—one that would operate against wayward Palestinians, and another that would wage jihad against Israel. Yassin and his men selected personnel for the two units by observing a training program conducted by the sports and culture committees of his welfare organization, which showed them who was physically fit and who had organizational ability and ideological commitment to the movement.
In a summary he wrote after questioning all the detainees, Kubi observed that Shehade’s men were “very smart, a little better educated than the average, fanatically religious, hovering around in their own space, almost impossible to penetrate” for intelligence. His report came up for discussion by the Shin Bet’s top echelon. “But,” says Aristo, “Avrum [Avraham Shalom, director of the agency] said there was no need at all to deal with it, and nothing harmful would come of it. Tzileigerim [Yiddish slang for ‘losers’ or ‘cripples’] was what he called Yassin and his gang. I got the impression that it was very important for Avrum to please the political echelon above him—that is, the Likud government and Shamir, who detested the PLO—and to tell them with that smile of his that he was clandestinely working on a sophisticated conspiracy that would bring about significant damage to Arafat. In the historical perspective, it may be that he was right—there was indeed a sophisticated conspiracy, so sophisticated that he himself and the whole Shin Bet missed it completely.”
—
YASSIN WAS SENTENCED TO thirteen years for his involvement in a series of weapons thefts but released a year later as part of a prisoner exchange with Ahmed Jibril’s PFLP. He immediately returned to where he’d left off—building the infrastructure for the organization. Yassin had a phenomenal memory, and he knew by heart the 1,500 code names he had devised for the various operatives, operations, and letterboxes. He could recite the résumé of every member, and he displayed astonishing awareness of technological innovations and Middle Eastern current affairs.
In the years afterward, Yassin also developed and dis
seminated his doctrine advocating the use of suicide attacks. He noted, for the benefit of his disciples, the differences between suicide, which is absolutely forbidden, and self-sacrifice on the battlefield, which is a religious commandment and ensures the martyr, and even his family members, a place in Paradise. Whenever the suicide has received the blessing of a qualified Islamic sheikh, Yassin ruled, the dying person is not acting out of personal motives, but is considered a shahid, a martyr, who has fallen in the jihad for the sake of Allah.
The Shin Bet, meanwhile, was in a difficult period of transition. The agency was trying to cope with a series of shocks caused by the Ashkelon bus affair and its aftermath. Within a brief period, most of the organization’s leadership had been replaced by younger men, and it took time for them to reach professional maturity. Several case officers and investigators have said that during this time they warned their superiors about the danger of extremist Islam, but the agency was too helpless to tackle it. When the First Intifada broke out, in late 1987, Yassin was already the most important religious-political figure in Gaza and the West Bank, standing at the head of a movement that had hundreds of members and tens of thousands of supporters. That December, Yassin declared that the jihad had begun. He named his organization the Islamic Resistance Movement, and its Arabic acronym was “Hamas,” which also means “enthusiasm.”
During the ensuing months, disjointed reports about the movement started coming in to the Shin Bet, and in August 1988 a large-scale operation was planned against it. The Shin Bet rounded up 180 people and put them through intensive questioning, but they were all well prepared and didn’t reveal the most important bit of information: that Salah Shehade, the most senior member detained in the roundup, had set up a secret military wing and was now commanding it. At first, he and Yassin, wry and clever men, called it Unit 101, after Ariel Sharon’s legendary command unit. Later, the name was changed to the Special Unit, Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, after a Palestinian leader who had carried out attacks on British and Jewish targets in the 1930s.
Shehade continued to command the military wing from prison, smuggling out encoded messages. In 1989, he and Yassin sent two members of the unit, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh and Muhammad Nasr, to abduct and kill two Israeli soldiers. They lay in wait, in a car with Israeli plates, at an intersection where they knew soldiers hitched rides, a very widespread practice in Israel, where many motorists are only too happy to help soldiers on brief furloughs to get home or back to their bases.
Two decades later, al-Mabhouh told Al Jazeera TV network how they had grabbed one of the soldiers, Ilan Saadon:
We disguised ourselves as religious Jews, with skullcaps on our heads, like rabbis. Another car came to the junction and dropped off passengers. Our car had boxes in it [to take up space, so only one hitchhiker could get in]. I was the driver. The boxes were behind me, and the door behind me was out of order. I told him [Saadon] to go around to the other side.
He did that and sat on the backseat. I and Abu Sahib [his partner, Nasr] had a prearranged signal that at the right moment I would make a sign with my hand, because I could see what was happening on the road ahead and behind. And about three kilometers after the junction, I gave the signal to Abu Sahib and he fired his Beretta pistol. I heard him [Saadon] breathing heavily….He took two bullets in the face and one in the chest, gasped, and that was it—finished. Afterward, we laid him on the seat and took him to the prearranged place.
Mabhouh added that he had wanted to shoot Saadon himself, but to his great regret it was his partner who enjoyed this privilege. In both abductions, al-Mabhouh and Nasr took photographs of themselves treading on the corpses of the soldiers to celebrate their victory.
Al-Mabhouh and Nasr fled to Egypt before the Shin Bet could arrest them. Al-Mabhouh became a key operational figure in Hamas abroad. The other members of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades who had provided logistical support to the two killers were arrested and subjected to torture, including mock executions and injections of sodium pentothal. All of them confessed, and one of them was dressed in an IDF uniform and driven around the Strip and made to point out where they had hidden Saadon’s rifle and dog tags, along with the weapons they had used.
Yassin was given a life sentence for his part in the slayings.
—
ON THE MORNING OF December 13, 1992, two masked men entered the office of the Red Cross in Al-Bireh, a town in the West Bank, and handed the receptionist a letter. They warned her not to open it until half an hour after they had left, and ran away.
It read, “Today, 13.12.92, the fifth anniversary of the founding of Hamas, an officer of the occupation army has been abducted. He is being held in a safe place….We notify the occupation authorities that we are demanding that they and the Israeli leadership release Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in exchange for the release of this officer.”
The letter was signed, “The Special Unit, Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the Military Arm, Hamas.” Attached to the letter was a photograph of the police ID card of First Senior Sergeant Nissim Toledano of the border police.
The prime minister and minister of defense, Yitzhak Rabin, decided not to comply with the kidnappers’ demand and instead launched a wide campaign of raids and arrests. Meanwhile, the Shin Bet tried to buy some time. A top official, Barak Ben-Zur, was sent to see Yassin in prison, to ask him to agree to be interviewed by the media and to instruct his followers not to harm the kidnapped police officer.
The sheikh received Ben-Zur sitting in his wheelchair, wrapped in a blanket, with “a smile that was almost cordial.” He gave a number of interviews and, in each, repeated the requested statement.
Only afterward did the Shin Bet realize why Yassin had been so obliging. He had foreseen the situation and had instructed his men in advance that whatever they heard him say in any interview, they should pay no attention and should not obey him, because the message would most likely have been extracted from him against his will.
Prison had not lessened Yassin’s influence, nor broken his will. “There will never be peace,” he told Ben-Zur, after the interviews were over and the cameras were switched off. “We’ll take what you give, but we will never give up our armed struggle. As long as I, Sheikh Yassin, am alive, I shall make sure that there will be no peace talks with Israel. I do not have a time problem: Ten more years, a hundred more years—in the end you will be wiped off the face of the earth.”
The Hamas men, as previously ordered, ignored Yassin’s public instructions not to harm Toledano. That night, the four abductors, dressed in ninja costumes and armed with knives, came to the cave where Toledano was being held. “We asked Israel to free Sheikh Ahmed Yassin for you,” they told him. “But your government refused, and this is proof that the lives of their soldiers do not interest them. We are sorry that we have to kill you.”
Toledano began to cry. He begged to be released.
“What is your last wish?” one of the Hamas men said.
“If you have decided to kill me, kill me when I’m wearing my uniform.”
The Hamas men strangled him, then stabbed him when it turned out he was still alive.
For Rabin, the murder of Toledano was the final straw. The week before, five other Israelis had been killed in terror attacks, most of them orchestrated by Hamas. The Rabin government, which now grasped the danger presented by Hamas, decided it was time to strike a decisive blow against the movement. Some in the Shin Bet proposed poisoning Yassin in prison, which would be relatively easy to do. Rabin rejected the idea out of hand, for fear of the riots that would inevitably ensue when it became known that Yassin had died while in Israeli custody.
IDF chief of staff Ehud Barak suggested a different alternative: the mass expulsion of Hamas activists to Lebanon. “We had tried a lot of methods against Hamas,” said Major General Danny Yatom, head of the IDF Central Command. “And it seemed to us, for some reason, that this expulsion to Le
banon would very severely damage the motivation of the terrorists whom we expelled—and of those who think about it in future.”
This was a problematic decision, ethically, legally, and pragmatically. The IDF and the Shin Bet hoped to execute the expulsion covertly, before the world could get wind of it, which put them under immense time pressure. Starting on December 16, they rounded up four hundred persons suspected of having links with Hamas—not one of them directly connected to the latest acts of terror—blindfolded them and handcuffed them, then loaded them onto buses and took them to the Lebanese border.
But news about the operation had leaked out anyway, and in Israel a number of NGOs, as well as the families of some of the deportees, petitioned the Supreme Court to halt it, which delayed the bus convoy for hours. The attorney general’s office refused to represent the government, believing that the expulsion was in fact a war crime, and chief of staff Barak himself had to go to the court to try to persuade the justices.
He succeeded, but in the meantime an international scandal had broken out. It turned out that about a quarter of the deportees had been loaded onto the buses by mistake, and were not the people the Shin Bet had meant to expel. Meanwhile, Lebanon blocked its borders, and the buses were stuck in a no-man’s-land between the Israeli-controlled Security Zone to the south and territory controlled by the Lebanese Armed Forces and Hezbollah to the north.
The IDF military police escort gave each deportee $50 in cash, a coat, and two blankets, then forced them off the buses, removing their blindfolds and plastic handcuffs. Then they turned the buses around and headed back into Israel. The deportees eventually pitched a tent camp at Marj al-Zuhour, near the Druze town of Hasbaya. At first, the government of Lebanon blocked attempts by the Red Cross to extend assistance, out of a desire to intensify the deportees’ distress and to embarrass the Israeli government even more.
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