Dichter phoned Prime Minister Sharon’s military secretary. He woke Sharon, who authorized “immediate execution” of the bombing raid.
The pilot started to close the canopy. His base commander came running up to his plane and climbed the ladder to his cockpit. “Do you want to know who it is?” he asked the pilot and the navigator. Who they were going to kill, he meant.
“Get off my plane,” the pilot said. “We don’t want to know. It means nothing.”
In a way, it didn’t. The men who did the actual killing, who flew the missions and released the bombs, often knew the least. At altitude, all they could see were small targets identified by the twelve numbers of the coordinates, and there was no need to look for anything more.
A siren sounded and the F-16 was cleared for takeoff. It was eleven o’clock on the night of July 22. Flying time from Hatzor to Gaza was two minutes, but the pilot was ordered to fly west, over the sea, far out into the dark. “Shehade, he smells planes, hears planes, and he runs away,” the pilot said later. “We wait over the sea for fifty minutes. Then my flight controller tells me on the radio, ‘Engage.’ ”
The plane streaked eastward, turned back to the west, and dropped the bomb. “You must have seen it in the movies,” the pilot said. “That’s what it looks like. We hit it, and the house collapses, falls down.”
—
IN THE DAYS BEFORE the F-16 took off, air force intelligence had carried out a number of reconnaissance missions over the house where Shehade was hiding. Analysts studied aerial photographs and saw solar heaters, laundry hung out to dry, and satellite dishes bolted to shacks. People lived there. The Shin Bet case officer thought so, too. Because the entire area was densely populated, he noted, he presumed that the shacks were, too.
But the Shin Bet did not get “positive intelligence” from any source indicating with certainty that the shacks were inhabited. In other words, none of the sources walked in and explicitly said that shack was occupied by this family. As the operational plans grew more detailed and the time for execution approached, common sense was overwhelmed by excitement over the opportunity to eliminate a man involved in the murders of almost five hundred people, including thirty who were killed after two other assassination missions had been scrapped. At some point, according to Shin Bet personnel involved, “no positive intelligence” became “no civilians live there.”
“The location of Shehade created a window of opportunity that was unlikely to be repeated at all or in the near future,” an inquiry later concluded. “He constituted a ticking time bomb that had to be neutralized.” The result was catastrophic. Shehade was killed outright, as was his assistant, Zaher Nassar, and his wife. But so were his daughter, Iman, and ten other civilians, including seven children, the youngest less than one year old. One hundred fifty people were wounded.
Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy, whose reports and columns reflect the concerns of liberal Israelis over the plight of the Palestinians, arrived at the scene a few hours after the disaster. He recalled:
They said they thought there were uninhabited shacks there. Those were two- and three-story buildings—there’s no such building in Gaza that isn’t inhabited. The people who were out to eliminate Shehade knew this.
I am not naïve or a bleeding heart. If I could rely on the establishment having restraints, I would certainly have been in favor of killing a man like Salah Shehade, as long as he was alone and it was possible to ensure that no one else would be hurt. But I know that it is impossible to rely on them to restrain themselves. There is no control, neither internal nor public, and ultimately, they do whatever they wish. The cost-benefit of assassinations is awful. Awful. This case is ample proof. Entire families were wiped out. In the hospital I saw a little boy about to die, his whole body full of shrapnel. Awful.
Avi Dichter immediately grasped the consequences. “The target has been eliminated,” he said, “but the operation failed.”
—
CURIOUSLY, THERE WAS LITTLE international condemnation of the attack. But in Israel, there was a storm of protest. The media, which generally repeated the statements put out by the IDF spokesperson and the Shin Bet, was harshly critical, amplifying anonymous leaks of mutual recrimination among those involved in the operation. More and more voices were heard in Israel questioning the wisdom of assassination as a weapon.
The commander of the air force, Major General Dan Halutz, who had not been directly involved in the operation because he was traveling abroad, was furious at the media and wanted to support his subordinates. He gave an interview to Haaretz in which he roundly condemned the critics, saying that some of them should be prosecuted for harming state security. Halutz stressed that he fully backed his pilots and completely condoned the elimination of Shehade, although he did express “sorrow over the loss of life among uninvolved persons.”
He recounted that a short time after the operation, he met with the airmen involved in the bombing. “Guys, you can sleep well at night,” he told them. “You did exactly what you were instructed to do. You did not deviate a millimeter to the left or the right. Let all those who have a problem with it come to me.”
Halutz, a former pilot himself, added, “If you nevertheless want to know what I feel when I release a bomb, then I’ll tell you: I feel a slight shudder in the wing as a result of the release of the bomb, after a second it passes and that’s all. That’s what I feel.”
The interview, and particularly the phrase “a slight shudder in the wing,” which has since become shorthand in Israel for indifference to the lives of innocents, only flared tempers further. Even other airmen were appalled. The pilot who dropped the bomb wasn’t initially concerned with whom it was that he hit—“That’s nice,” he said when his commander told him it was Shehade—but whether it was a good hit. “But a few days after that,” he said, “three guys came to the squadron. Three reservists. They said, ‘What have you done? You went, you killed, you murdered.’ ”
A rebellion was rising among reservist pilots, who after their discharge do a day’s duty every week in peacetime, and full-scale service in wartime. They were generally older, had lived as civilians, and saw the world more from a perspective of democratic governance than military dominance. Groups of them—airmen and Sayeret Matkal reservists—published (separately) letters in the media announcing their refusal to take part in aggressive actions against Palestinians, primarily targeted killings. The protesting airmen and soldiers knew they would pay a high price for signing the open letters. In a tense public atmosphere created by the bloodshed of the suicide terrorists, these statements were perceived by many Israelis as no less than treason, and by some of the top IDF officials as a refusal to carry out orders in wartime.
Particularly striking was the signature of former brigadier general Iftach Spector, a pilot with a world record of twelve enemy supersonic fighters shot down, who was considered by many to be the best combat pilot in the history of the Israeli Air Force. Another signatory was Lieutenant Colonel Yoel Peterberg, a renowned helicopter pilot who had been decorated for extreme bravery in rescuing a ground force pinned down by an ambush in Lebanon.
“Shalom, my name is Yoel,” he said in a speech at a protest rally. “I have been the pilot of Cobra, Apache, and Blackhawk helicopters in the Israel Defense Forces, and today I am refusing to serve in the Israel occupation forces….We are the soldiers of peace. We shall stop the war, the death, and the grieving. You are the leaders of the state, leaders of the army, and you will face the consequences. If not in Israeli courts, then in the court at The Hague, and if not in The Hague, then before your maker.”
Before the intifada, targeted killings had been primarily the secret business of small, compartmentalized teams working for the Mossad, far from the borders of the country. They might have been carried out in the national interest, but any moral reckoning was confined to a handful of operatives and government
ministers. Once those intimate operations were developed into a large-scale killing machine, however, thousands of people became complicit. IDF soldiers and airmen, Shin Bet personnel, the people who collected and filtered and analyzed and disseminated intelligence—they were all directly involved, often in more important ways than those who did the actual killing. And by the summer of 2002, no Israeli could claim ignorance of what was being done in his name.
The protests were greeted mostly by angry rebuttals. Ehud Yatom, the former Shin Bet operative who had killed the two Bus 300 prisoners, was at the time a politician in Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party (and was to become a Knesset member in 2003). Those who refused to serve were “defeatists,” he said. “They must be condemned, prosecuted, stripped of their unit’s insignia, and thrown out of the army.” The IDF announced that it would indeed oust those who did not withdraw their signatures from the protest letters.
Three days after the pilots’ letter was published, Ariel Sharon’s closest advisers gathered at his Sycamore Farm (Havat Shikmim), in southern Israel. One of them called the letter “the wailing of defeatists.” Sharon raised his voice at him. “You are wrong,” he snapped. “These are not those beatniks who report to the induction center with the earrings and the green curl. There are people on this list who have done the most daring of deeds for Israel.”
Sharon looked at his advisers. He understood how dire the situation had become. “A fire,” he said, “has taken hold among the cedars.”
WHEN A PERSON DIES, the joke goes, he ascends to Heaven to stand before God, seated on his divine throne. God asks each of the newly dead whether he should remain in Heaven or be cast into Hell. Each one answers, God passes his judgment, and then the next steps forward.
In the joke, the last person is always a network intelligence officer. Within the larger military and intelligence communities, NIOs are the ones who pick which bits of intel among the massive flood arriving every day are worth pursuing. They decide what is important and what is not. They decide, in a way, which people will stand in line before God’s throne.
The NIO steps forward. “And where should you go?” God asks.
“Nowhere,” the NIO says, slightly annoyed. “You’re sitting in my chair.”
Amir (not his real name) was an NIO, a bright young man assigned to Unit 8200, one of the most prestigious outfits in the IDF. He worked, like all NIOs, at a base protected by reinforced concrete, monitoring information. Most of the incoming material couldn’t be translated and processed, because there was simply too much of it and too little time. The NIOs’ job, then, was to decide which channels of communication should be listened to and which broadcasts should be intercepted. Soldiers like Amir decided which bits of the intelligence sieved by his subordinates would be translated and disseminated. He was the final editor of the “article,” as intelligence messages are called in 8200; he wrote the headline and decided who would read it. He had to decide, for example, whether the speaker in an intercepted conversation was a storekeeper ordering merchandise or a jihadist delivering coded instructions to prepare a bomb. If he made a mistake, innocent people—Israelis on one side, a hapless shop owner on the other—could die. And he needed to do all of this very quickly.
Officially, Amir and his colleagues at Unit 8200’s Turban base were responsible for stopping terror attacks. Unofficially, they were deciding whom Israel killed. True, it was Sharon who authorized the targeted killings, and there was a long chain of command between them and the Prime Minister’s Office. But the politicians merely approved the intelligence community’s recommendations, which were ultimately conceived, to a large extent, by the NIO. “Our role in the selection of targets for assassination was dramatic,” one NIO said. “I could decide if, in my estimation, someone was the coordinator of a cell, to ‘sit on him’ firmly and to collect enough info to zero in on him as a target for elimination. If the man actually was involved in terror, it was a process that would take a few weeks, no more.”
Often, Unit 8200 also picked out buildings to bomb. Sharon, along with IDF chief of staff Moshe Yaalon, held the Palestinian Authority fully responsible for every attack, even if the actual perpetrators came from organizations—Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad—that opposed the Authority. As a result, Israel took punitive measures against the Palestinian Authority after each attack, bombing its facilities. Most of these facilities were offices of the civilian government, and the same ones were often bombed repeatedly, even after they had been destroyed and abandoned. The bombings were a way to send a message to the Palestinians, but also simply a way for Israel’s leaders and soldiers to express their frustration and anger.
“The targets for reprisal bombardments were not chosen in order to achieve a concrete military goal,” Amir said, “but were rather a political message that could be summed up simply as ‘We’ll show them.’ ”
At first, Israel would notify the Palestinian leadership that the air force was setting out to destroy a particular building, in order to give the people inside time to evacuate. But over time, this practice eroded to a certain extent, and later, toward the end of 2002, the air force often bombed at night, without advance warning, on the assumption that the buildings were empty at that time. It was, for the most part, a purely symbolic campaign.
—
ON JANUARY 5, 2003, two suicide bombers from Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades slipped into Tel Aviv and made their way toward the old central bus station. At 6:26 P.M., they blew themselves up near downtown Tel Aviv. The final death count was twenty-three, with more than a hundred wounded. Many were babies or children.
The Palestinian Authority condemned the attack and promised to make every effort to apprehend the men who had planned it. The Israelis were not convinced of the sincerity of this condemnation, however. After all, the bombers came from an organization affiliated with Fatah, which was under Arafat’s command. Most of the top members of the Palestinian Authority were Fatah people.
Prime Minister Sharon immediately summoned the defense leadership for a consultation in his office, and they decided to step up action against the Palestinian Authority.
Following that meeting, less than three hours after the attack, chief of staff Yaalon decided to bomb Target 7068, the code name for the Fatah branch office in the Gaza Strip city of Khan Yunis. This time, there would be no warning, and the attack would not come at night. The IDF would instead wait, deliberately and patiently, until there were people in the building.
At 11:45 P.M., the Targets Department (Anaf Matarot) at AMAN HQ submitted a request to the 8200 Turban base to collect information on the Fatah building in Khan Yunis. At 12:31 A.M., Turban sent out its report on the chosen target.
According to the report, Target 7068 had no connection to terror activities. The sergeant who conducted the investigation of the site wrote, simply and directly, “Don’t bomb them—they haven’t done anything bad.”
“It was a very informal way of putting it,” Amir said, “and of course I had to change the wording to something more businesslike before sending out the cable. But his heading reflected the content of the report very well. No activity connected to terror took place there, just routine office work regarding local political activists, paying out welfare and salaries. It was the Gaza Strip equivalent of a labor union local.”
Early the next morning, Amir, who assumed Target 7068 would be just another symbolic strike, told AMAN HQ that no one was in the building and that it was safe to start the bombardment.
“It’s on hold,” he was told by a representative of AMAN’s Targets Department. “They’re waiting for the office to open.”
“What? Who are they expecting?”
“No one. It’s not a particular person; just anyone. Let us know when someone goes inside.”
That seemed strange. Amir thought it had to be a misunderstanding. The presence of civilians in a building was a reason t
o stand down, not to strike. Waiting for people—bureaucrats, cleaners, secretaries—went flatly against Finkelstein’s 2001 legal memo. Targeting civilians, in fact, was an outright war crime.
But there was no misunderstanding. The Targets Department issued a written order so that everyone understood that they were waiting for “an indication” that the building was occupied: “Indication = an attempt to make a phone call or a phone conversation. Do not wait for the speaker to identify himself or for a conversation of any value to take place. Every indication of the habitation of the building is to be reported, without connection to who the speaker is or the content of the conversation.” In other words, the intention was simply to kill someone—anyone.
The order bothered some of the NIOs, who dared speak of it only in the mess hall. “We sat there, three NIOs eating supper,” Amir recalled. “And someone said, half in jest but actually serious, ‘Say, isn’t this precisely the definition of a manifestly illegal order?’ He said it offhandedly, not in any heavy way, but it made us start thinking. Maybe we were really crossing a red line here? Maybe this was something improper? How would we know who we were killing? Maybe it would be a kid from a nearby school who went in to make a phone call. Maybe it would be a clerk who came to hand out UN aid money, or an office cleaner who came in early, before work hours.”
—
THE FACT THAT SUCH a conversation would take place among members of Unit 8200 was fitting. This, after all, was the unit that had tried its hardest to warn AMAN in the days preceding the surprise attacks on Israel in October 1973, cautioning that Egypt and Syria were bent on going to war.
In the wake of that failure, “we intentionally chose opinionated people for the position of NIO, who think out of the box and who would not be afraid to say what they thought,” said Professor Eyal Zisser, a prominent Tel Aviv University Middle East specialist who did his IDF reserves service as head of the NIO selection committee.
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