Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  As it happened, the expulsion was in fact a serious blow to Hamas. At this point, its two top leaders, Yassin and Shehade, were in an Israeli prison, and the rest of its leaders were now in a remote tent camp on a freezing, windy hillside in Lebanon, without electricity, without means of communication, wet and miserable.

  But the situation changed dramatically a week after the expulsion, when a group of Lebanese came to visit. Their leader introduced himself as Wafik Safa of Hezbollah, greeted them in the name of Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, and asked if the deportees needed any help.

  This visit had come after a series of meetings held between Nasrallah, the IRGC, Mughniyeh, and Safa, who had become a kind of foreign minister for the organization. Mughniyeh had seen the expulsion and the sufferings of the Hamas group as a godsend. In his mind, Hezbollah could and should use the opportunity to expand its influence beyond the borders of Lebanon, with partners who were not necessarily Iranian or Shiite. In the end, he managed to persuade the others, too.

  Militant Shiites did not, as a general rule, make alliances with Sunni Muslim Palestinians. This was a surprising gesture toward Sunni Muslim Hamas, then, and Hamas, too, was initially hesitant. The link didn’t seem natural to them, either, but their predicament was decisive, and they shared a hatred of a common enemy. They responded affirmatively, and within a short time, convoys of donkeys and mules began bringing in more weatherproof tents, warm clothes, heating stoves, and fuel, as well as large quantities of food and cleaning and laundry materials to see them through the harsh winter.

  Next came the Lebanese media—some under the control or influence of Hezbollah, but others simply covering a good story—to tell the world about the sufferings of the deportees. Then came military and terrorism instructors. Until that point, Hamas had had almost no training in combat operations or intelligence. In this respect, the expulsion turned out to be a godsend for them, too.

  Mughniyeh’s men, commanded by his brother-in-law, Mustafa Badreddine, along with instructors from the Al-Quds force of the IRGC, set up a guarded area near the tent camp, but far enough away to avoid the prying eyes of the media that were now constantly covering the camp. Within this area, courses were held in communications, encryption, and field security, light arms, rocket launchers, espionage and counterespionage, urban warfare, hand-to-hand combat, and more.

  Mughniyeh’s instructors were particularly impressed by a twenty-eight-year-old electrical engineer from the northern West Bank, a graduate of Bir Zeit University named Yahya Ayyash, who would, appropriately, come to be known as “the Engineer.” The Iranian and Hezbollah experts taught him how to clandestinely make explosives from domestic items that were easy to buy, how to make small but deadly explosive devices using nails and screws as shrapnel, and how to make car bombs. Mughniyeh himself came to the camp to talk with Ayyash and some of his comrades about the ways in which potential candidates for suicide bombings could be located and recruited—how to approach them and how to handle the sensitive and difficult process of persuading them to do the deed.

  While his men were being trained on a desolate mountain, Yassin’s organization was being rebuilt in the West Bank and Gaza. Over the years, Hamas had established a vast network of activists and fundraisers in the Persian Gulf, Jordan, and the United States, under the overall command of Mousa Abu Marzook, a U.S. citizen. Wealthy sheikhs from Saudi Arabia, along with counterparts from the Gulf emirates and wealthy Muslims in the West, had contributed funds to the organization. After the mass expulsion, Marzook dispatched one of his aides, Muhammad Salah, from the United States to the occupied territories with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.

  International pressure on Israel mounted daily. There was continuous media coverage of the camp, a sharp condemnation by the UN Security Council and the threat of sanctions, and an increasingly acrimonious confrontation with the administration of newly sworn-in president Bill Clinton and his secretary of state, Warren Christopher. By February 1992, Rabin realized that the whole thing had been a big mistake, and he agreed to Christopher’s proposal to repatriate some of the deportees immediately and the rest by the end of the year, in exchange for a U.S. veto on Israel’s behalf in the Security Council.

  The deportees returned to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as victors. Ayyash was made a commander of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades in the West Bank, and a short time later he organized the suicide bombing at Mehola in April 1993, in which the terrorist and a civilian were killed. For his next attack, though, Ayyash waited for a defining moment, something that would forever justify and legitimize suicide bombing in the eyes of the Palestinians.

  That moment came on February 25, 1994, when Dr. Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born follower of Rabbi Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League, who had immigrated to Kiryat Arba, a settlement near Hebron, opened fire on Muslims worshipping in that city’s Ibrahimi Mosque, located at Cave of the Patriarchs, the site revered by both faiths as the burial place of Abraham.

  During a minute and a half of shooting, using his IDF-issued Galil rifle and wearing an IDF uniform, Goldstein managed to replace four magazines. Then one of the Muslims threw a fire extinguisher at him and knocked him down. The worshippers pounced on him and beat him to death. Before he was incapacitated, he managed to murder twenty-nine worshippers and injure more than a hundred.

  Throughout the Muslim world, there were many who saw this act as not only a despicable crime against innocent people, but also a declaration of war by the Jews against Islam itself.

  This was the moment Yahya Ayyash had been waiting for. He counted the ritual forty days of mourning before striking, and then, on April 6, a suicide bomber recruited by Ayyash blew himself up close to two buses in the Israeli town of Afula, just north of the West Bank, taking eight civilians with him. A week later, another suicide bomber killed five Israelis in the bus station in Hadera. On October 19, Ayyash struck in the heart of Tel Aviv, where a Palestinian detonated his suicide belt on a No. 5 bus on the city’s Dizengoff Street, killing twenty-two. The bombings went on and on.

  “Until then, the Palestinian terrorists we were acquainted with had a lust for life,” the Shin Bet’s Avi Dichter said. “Even Leila Khaled, in her last hijacking with two grenades in her hands, when faced by an Israeli security guard with a pistol, didn’t have the guts to blow herself up. The change in 1993 was dramatic, and it surprised us.

  “The power of the terrorists had grown exponentially. A suicide bomber doesn’t need operational skill; it’s just one switch, off and on. When there are four hundred on the waiting list to be suicide terrorists, everyone can see the gravity of the problem.”

  Hamas’s competitors took notice of Ayyash’s successes and the support his activities received in the Palestinian streets. On November 11, 1994, a member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) blew himself up at an IDF post at Netzarim Junction, in the Gaza Strip, killing three reserve officers. On January 22, 1995, an Islamic Jihad (IJO) terrorist wearing an IDF uniform pushed his way into the center of a crowd of soldiers waiting at a bus stop at Beit Lid, twenty-five miles northeast of Tel Aviv. He pushed a switch that detonated twenty-two pounds of explosives on his person. Dozens of soldiers were cut down by the huge blast. When others ran toward the wounded, who were screaming for help, a second suicide bomber blew himself up in their midst. A third terrorist was supposed to follow that up minutes later but got cold feet and ran away.

  Twenty-one soldiers and one civilian were killed in that attack, and sixty-six were wounded, some very badly. Prime Minister and Defense Minister Rabin came to the scene shortly after the blasts, the junction still littered with body parts and stained with blood. A spontaneous demonstration of angry citizens took place while he was there. However, the protesters were not chanting slogans against terror, but rather against Rabin. “Go to Gaza!” they yelled, a curse that, in Hebrew, sounds similar to “Go to Hell.”

  On his
return to Tel Aviv, Rabin, “his blood boiling with fury,” in the words of his bureau chief, Eitan Haber, called a meeting of all the heads of the defense establishment. “This madness must be stopped,” he said. “Bring me Red Pages to sign.”

  THIS WAS NOT THE way Yitzhak Rabin had imagined his second term as prime minister of Israel would turn out.

  He had been elected on the promise to deliver both security—he was perceived as a tough military leader, uncompromising in the war on terror—and a diplomatic initiative that would extricate Israel from its isolation, bring economic prosperity, and put an end to the intifada.

  Rabin had indeed reached the conclusion that the occupation of Palestinian lands needed to end. He agreed to the Oslo process, initiated by Shimon Peres and his associates, though he did so rather sourly, with much doubt and skepticism of the intentions of the Palestinians. All this was evident in his face and body language when President Clinton coaxed him into a handshake with Yasser Arafat at the signing ceremony on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993.

  Rabin believed that the process should be conducted gradually, with Israel pulling out of only Gaza and Jericho at first, instead of signing a comprehensive agreement right away. That would allow Israel to hand over parts of the occupied territories to the Palestinian Authority while continually checking to make sure Arafat was fulfilling his end of the agreement. It would also mean that the main items still in contention—the right of return for Palestinian refugees, the status of Jerusalem, the future of the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, and whether the Palestinian Authority would become a sovereign state—would be left to be decided on at a later date. Rabin hoped this would allow him to avert the divisive controversy that would almost certainly arise in Israel when these issues came to a head.

  But controversy followed Rabin anyway. A large section of the Israeli public believed that the Oslo Accords had increased the likelihood of terror attacks, and that because of the peace process and the transfer of territory to Arafat’s control, terrorism was on the rise. All the Israeli right wing had to do was quote, word for word, what Yassin was saying—that there would never be any compromise, that he would never accept the existence of a Jewish state. What began as minor demonstrations by small groups of extremist settlers grew into a protest campaign across the length and breadth of Israel, drawing increased strength after each terror attack and focusing more and more on vicious incitement against Rabin himself. These protests were spurred on by the leaders of the Likud, Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu.

  Meanwhile, the Palestinians saw with rising frustration how they were being dispossessed of their lands—Rabin did restrict the construction of new settlements, but he did not stop construction altogether, and he did not evacuate even a single existing settlement in the occupied areas—and they had no sense that the process would lead to the establishment of a state of their own. At the same time, because Arafat wanted to avoid a confrontation with the Islamist opposition, he refrained from any attempt to combat the guerrilla and suicide terror attacks of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

  “Neither of the sides grasped the meaning of the other side’s demands,” said Ami Ayalon, head of the Shin Bet in the second half of the 1990s, “so that ultimately it transpired that both sides felt cheated, with a great degree of justifiability. We didn’t get security, and they didn’t get a state.”

  Efforts to resolve the conflicts on Israel’s northern borders were no more successful. Secretary of State Christopher mediated between Israel and Syria, with the goal of reaching a peace agreement under which Israel would withdraw from the Golan Heights and perhaps also from Lebanon, while Syria would work to put a stop to Hezbollah’s actions against Israel. But no significant breakthroughs were made. Hezbollah, egged on by the Syrians, who were trying to exert pressure on Israel, continued inflicting casualties on the IDF forces in Lebanon.

  The status quo in the Lebanese Security Zone was wearing thin for the Israelis. The IDF’s field commanders were furious, demanding that they be given free rein to go into action. The most prominent of these commanders was Brigadier General Erez Gerstein, a burly man with enough charisma and self-confidence that many saw him as a future chief of staff. Gerstein saw parallels between southern Lebanon and Vietnam, mostly in terms of lessons to be learned from American mistakes. “We sit in the fortresses scratching our balls instead of going out, thinking like them [Hezbollah], hitting them where they don’t expect it, and killing their commanders,” he said.

  The SLA troops were also dissatisfied, feeling like cannon fodder, restrained from fighting back. Aql al-Hashem, the deputy commander of the militia, had for years pleaded with Israel to at least target Hezbollah officers.

  These calls didn’t fall on deaf ears. On January 1, 1995, Amnon Lipkin-Shahak succeeded Ehud Barak as chief of staff. Determined to escape the shadow of his predecessor, he decided to change the policy in Lebanon. From now on, it would be a war, and Hezbollah would be treated as a full-fledged enemy. He needed resources: personnel who could gather intelligence and special-operations squads skilled in sabotage and assassination.

  Lipkin-Shahak and the head of the Northern Command, Major General Amiram Levin, one of the IDF’s leading experts in commando warfare, quickly organized a new commando unit, known as Egoz (Hebrew for “Nut”), to wage counterguerrilla warfare against Hezbollah. One of its first commanders, Moshe Tamir, explained that “a large part of the tactics that I developed in the Egoz unit…came from books compiled by the British Army about fighting in the Himalayas, in Indochina. Also, the experience of the Americans in Vietnam, especially at the lower levels, was instructive.” Like the officers of the British and American forces, and the French in Algeria, Tamir, Gerstein, and their colleagues believed that if they were given adequate resources, time, and support from the rear, it would be possible to defeat Hezbollah.

  Egoz began conducting ambushes and raids inside Lebanon, in the areas where Hezbollah felt safe, surprising the militiamen and killing large numbers of them. One of the men killed was Hadi Nasrallah, the son of the leader of the movement.

  Levin had taken part in Operation Spring of Youth, and he saw great importance in targeted strikes against Hezbollah commanders. Ronen Cohen, who had just become head of the Lebanon desk in the Northern Command’s intelligence section, had to apply the new policy. The two decided to focus on killing middle-ranking militia officers, regional commanders in southern Lebanon, and not the top-level officials. Levin believed that Hezbollah distinguished between operations targeting one of its leaders or the center of its activities in Beirut and tactical warfare of the kind being waged in southern Lebanon. The former would provoke an extreme reaction, perhaps even outside the Middle East, whereas the response to the latter would be limited in scope and confined to Lebanon and northern Israel.

  Until this point, the Mossad had carried out all targeted killings outside of Israel, while the IDF only provided support, at most. But the Mossad didn’t see Hezbollah as much more than a border problem that the IDF should cope with, and even if it had changed its order of priorities, the organization was almost incapable of operating offensively in Lebanon. “In brief,” Cohen said, “it was clear to me that if we wanted to hit quality Hezbollah targets we, the IDF, would have to do it on our own.”

  The hit on Mussawi, strategically flawed as it was, seemed to Cohen to be a good tactical model: Identify a target with a drone, mark him with a laser, then fire a missile. It was an inexpensive, efficient method.

  Northern Command intelligence picked a target, a man by the name of Rida Yassin, better known as Abu-Ali Rida, commander of Hezbollah in the Nabatieh area, who lived in the village of Zawtar al-Charkiyeh. As an intermediate-level commander in southern Lebanon, Rida fit the profile perfectly, and he was accessible in a way that other commanders of similar seniority were not.

  After two weeks of surveillance, Cohen managed to gather enough information about Rida,
who was given the code name Golden Beehive, to plan an operation. Once a week, Rida went to a meeting of Hezbollah senior staff in Beirut, returning late at night, then driving to his office at about 8:30 the next morning. The original plan called for an agent to stand lookout at that time to be sure that Rida got into his car and that no one else was with him. Once that was confirmed, a drone would track him until he left the village, then identify the car with its laser for an Apache helicopter to fire its missile.

  Operation Golden Beehive, which was managed from the Northern Command war room, was almost called off. On March 30, 1995, the agent posted near Rida’s house was surprised to see Rida’s parking space empty. He couldn’t remain there for long without arousing suspicion, and had to leave. But the drone remained in the sky above, transmitting images from a distance until the monitors saw Rida’s car returning home. Someone got out and went into the house, but Levin, Cohen, and their subordinates in the command bunker could not see his face. Nor could they identify the person who left the house an hour later, started the car, and drove out of the village, crossing the Litani River and moving south toward Nabatieh. The dilemma was clear: Who was driving the car now? Was it Rida or one of his children? Should the order be given to fire the missile?

  Levin gambled. He told the Apache pilot to fire.

  About three hours later, Hezbollah’s radio networks exploded with transmissions about the killing. Rida, and only Rida, had been in the car. In the radio chatter, Israeli monitors could hear that Mughniyeh’s men were rattled, their confidence undermined. One of their own had been assassinated from afar, marked by a silent and unseen flying robot. It was only the second time a drone had been used to kill a man.