Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  Defining the parameters had taken months of debate, as had agreeing on whether such killings were legal, moral, and, most important, strategically practical. “Drawing analogies between terrorism and a snake, which will stop functioning if you cut off its head, is such an oversimplification that it’s alarming to think anyone believes it,” argued Ami Ayalon, Avi Dichter’s predecessor as Shin Bet director. “A terror organization is built like a matrix. Even if it does have a head, then it is an ideological head that hardly controls the operative head.” In other words, there wasn’t much of an operational point. But it did create a parallel precedent. If the political leaders of Hamas were legitimate targets, he said, what about “the [Israeli] defense minister who sits in his office and authorizes actions? Does this make him a legitimate target for elimination?”

  Nonetheless, Operation Picking Anemones was eased into practice. Three months after Makadmeh was hit, an IDF drone fired at Abd al-Aziz Rantisi, the number-two man in Hamas, but only wounded him. Then, on August 12, Ismail Abu Shanab, a founder of Hamas, the leader of its political arm, and one of its main spokesmen in the Arabic and foreign media, was killed near the UN building in Gaza by five missiles fired from an Apache.

  As senior Foreign Ministry officials had feared prior to embarking on Operation Picking Anemones, the international community did indeed make a distinction between attacking military operatives and political operatives. The Abu Shanab assassination sharpened the international debate about Israel’s actions, despite the West’s recognition that Israel was waging a tough battle against suicide bombers.

  UN Secretary General Kofi Annan condemned the hit, declaring that Israel had no right to carry out an “extrajudicial killing” of a senior Hamas leader. The late Abu Shanab’s boss, Sheikh Yassin, stated his intentions in starker terms: “All of the red lines have been crossed,” he said in a statement to the Palestinian media. “And Israel will pay for it.”

  —

  EXACTLY HOW ISRAEL WOULD pay for its latest escalation was unclear, perhaps even to Yassin. The old rules were bloody and savage, but at least they marked some semblance of a tactical boundary. The killing of Abu Shanab—someone who had been involved in the political part of Hamas and was seen by leaders of the organization as off-limits—deeply rattled Hamas. Yassin needed to figure out a response, and quickly.

  Shortly after that assassination, Yassin ordered all of Hamas’s military and political leadership to gather on September 6 at the home of Dr. Marwan Abu Ras, a leading religious figure in Gaza and a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. That was an extraordinary risk—putting all of his senior men in one spot at one time created an enormous target. If the secret got out, Yassin’s only hope would be that Israel might decide that killing everyone wouldn’t be worth the potential collateral damage.

  Avi Dichter, the Shin Bet director, who had learned of the meeting from both human and technological sources, thought it might be a fair trade. “In my entire career,” he said, “never did such a serious adversary make such a serious mistake, a profound strategic mistake.”

  The meeting was supposed to begin at four o’clock. By 3:40 P.M., a pair of F-16s armed with one-ton bombs were in the air, circling above the Mediterranean Sea in order to avoid stirring suspicion among those gathered in the home. The Air Force analysis wing had calculated that a bomb that big was needed to destroy Abu Ras’s three-story house.

  At 3:45, chief of staff Yaalon called in the operations analysts with maps and aerial photographs.

  “What’s your estimate for collateral damage?” Yaalon asked.

  There was a five-story apartment building close to the Abu Ras house. Nearly forty families lived there. “The men may not be home from work at 4 P.M.,” AMAN chief Zeevi-Farkash said, “but it’s clear that there must be dozens of women and children there.”

  “And what will happen to them if we use the one-ton bomb?”

  “Dozens of casualties, possibly even more than that,” another analyst answered.

  The protests that followed the Shehade fiasco hadn’t been forgotten. “There wasn’t anyone among us who was obsessed with killing,” said Dov Weissglass, Sharon’s aide. “On the contrary, in time the air force realized that the damage that seven or eight civilian deaths caused was far greater than the benefits of eliminating one terrorist.” The air force had even worked to develop munitions with a smaller blast radius, replacing up to 90 percent of the explosive material with cement. But a cement bomb wasn’t going to take out a three-story building.

  Yaalon joined a conference call with Sharon, Dichter, and three others. “Mr. Prime Minister,” he said, “I recommend calling off the strike. The price of the operation will be dozens of civilians killed. We’ll win the battle but lose the war in both the international and domestic arenas. The people of Israel will not tolerate another blow like this against women and children. We need internal and external legitimacy to carry on with our fight—and here we’re liable to deal both a devastating blow.”

  Dichter argued that Israel would be missing a historic opportunity to cause “perhaps irreparable” damage to its principal enemy.

  But Yaalon insisted. “Under no circumstances can we do this,” he said. “We could wipe out the Hamas leadership, but we’re also at risk of getting hundreds of thousands of protesters in Rabin Square, yelling that we are a brutal army that murders women and children. This we need to avoid. We’ll get our chance. Their day will come.”

  Sharon called off the strike.

  —

  DICHTER STAYED BEHIND IN the Joint War Room, fuming and frustrated. Ironically, he’d been among the first to recognize what a disaster the Shehade fiasco had been, to realize that killing and wounding scores of civilians meant that “the target has been eliminated, but the operation failed.”

  But the Hamas gathering was historic. “The Dream Team gathering,” he called it. He scrolled through all the intelligence information about the Hamas conclave and, after a few minutes, hit upon a solution. The diwan, the carpeted sitting room where meetings would be held, was on the top floor, where the drapes had been drawn. It was reasonable to assume the meeting would be held there, and he got an analyst in the JWR to say as much. Dichter called up operations analysts and asked if there was a way to destroy only that part of the house, ensuring that there would be no damage to adjoining structures. The reply was affirmative: If a small missile with a quarter-ton warhead was fired through a window, it would assure the destruction of everyone in the room while doing little or no damage outside of it.

  Dichter got everyone back on the phone and told them the meeting would probably take place on the third floor. Zeevi-Farkash was doubtful. Yaalon was not convinced, either. “It seemed a little strange to me that they would carry Yassin up in his wheelchair,” he said. “But that was the Shin Bet’s assessment. A top floor I know how to wreck without causing casualties in the adjoining houses. It was possible to proceed.” Again, there was a conference call with all of the top officials on the secure phone line. Sharon listened until Dichter and Yaalon finished speaking, and approved the operation.

  The JWR put three drones into the air to keep an eye on the house. They watched the participants arriving and entering. The Shin Bet’s information proved to be precise—the entire political and military leadership of Hamas was there, including Yassin in his wheelchair, Ahmed Jabari, who had replaced Shehade as field commander, and Mohammed Deif, commander of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. The Israelis had been trying to kill Deif for more than seven years, ever since he replaced Yahya Ayyash in early 1996. “Each time, we took off an arm or a leg of his, but he survived it all,” says a senior Shin Bet official who was present in the JWR that day.

  At 4:35, an F-16 pilot launched a missile through the draped window on the third floor. “Alpha,” reported the pilot, indicating a direct bull’s-eye hit. The top of the building erupted in flames, and d
ebris, including bricks and furniture, flew in all directions. JWR analysts tried to see whether the debris also included body parts. An enormous explosion shook the entire area.

  But the meeting had been on the ground floor. “They just got up, brushed off the dust, and ran away from the house,” Dichter said. “We watched them running for their lives. For a moment, I even thought that I saw Sheikh Yassin getting up on his feet from the wheelchair, out of panic, and starting to run.”

  Dichter wanted to send in a squadron of drones to blast all of the cars screeching out of the house’s parking space, but he was overruled by Defense Minister Mofaz, because “civilians were likely to be hurt.”

  “I looked around the war room,” said Dichter, “and I saw how everyone was going out of their mind at the missed chance. This was a classic example of the price you have to pay because of the problems that a story like the Shehade hit creates. I wouldn’t dare to count up the number of Israelis who were killed and wounded due to the decision not to blast the whole house. Later on, we had to handle them one at a time. In some cases, we succeeded, after great efforts. Some of them, I’m sorry to say, are alive to this day.”

  —

  THREE DAYS AFTER THE strike on Abu Ras’s house, just before six o’clock, a man wearing an army uniform and carrying a large backpack joined a group of hundreds of IDF soldiers waiting outside the Tzrifin army base in the late-afternoon heat. The bus stop and hitchhiking post had a high roof to provide shade from the blistering sun, and the men waited there for a bus or a lift from someone happy to offer a ride to the soldiers hurrying to begin their brief furloughs.

  A few minutes later, an IDF patrol approached the stop. The man, a Hamas suicide bomber, apparently feared that he would be detected and pressed the button.

  Nine soldiers were killed, and eighteen were wounded.

  Hamas was flailing, lashing back at Israel for the strike on Abu Ras’s house and the assassinations of its political figures. To retaliate, Hamas had returned to the same low-tech, high-terror tactics that had led to Israel’s escalation in the first place: suicide bombers.

  The mission had been assigned to the Hamas command center in Ramallah, which operated a cell already in contact with several potential suicide bombers from Beit Liqya, a Palestinian village northwest of Jerusalem. A day before the Tzrifin attack, a suicide bomber was dispatched to a restaurant in Jerusalem, but he retreated at the last minute, overcome by fear. Another bomber recruited for the mission, Ihab Abu Salim, was the young man who blew himself up the next day at the Tzrifin hitchhiking post.

  Prime Minister Sharon received news of the attack while meeting in New Delhi with his Indian counterpart, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. In his absence, he authorized Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom to take “the necessary response actions.” Shalom convened an urgent meeting of the heads of the IDF and the intelligence community at the Ministry of Defense.

  At 10 P.M., four hours after the soldiers at Tzrifin were murdered, Shalom asked the Shin Bet and AMAN representatives present at the meeting whom in Hamas they could kill, immediately. A suicide attack would not go unanswered. “We have quite good surveillance on Mahmoud al-Zahar,” a Shin Bet official said. Al-Zahar was a surgeon, but also one of the founders of Hamas, and he was seen as the leader of the extreme faction in the organization.

  “Maybe we could take him out, but it would have implications as far as hurting uninvolved persons is concerned.”

  An hour passed. Part of the discussion also revolved around the question of what to do with Yasser Arafat. Silvan Shalom had long been calling for Arafat to be killed, or at least expelled. “He orchestrates terror, he stands behind attacks, and as long as he’s around, there’s no chance of stopping the bloodbath and reaching an accord with the Palestinians.” Shalom said that a very senior official in the U.S. administration had telephoned him after hearing about the attack and asked, “Do you intend to assassinate the bastard?”

  Opinions on how to handle Arafat were divided. In any case, it was clear that this was a major decision that only the prime minister could make.

  At 11:20 P.M., aides came into the room. Their faces were grave. Another suicide bomber had attacked, this time in Café Hillel, in Jerusalem’s German Colony. Seven people were dead, fifty-seven wounded. The casualties included Dr. David Appelbaum, the director of the emergency unit at Shaare Zedek Medical Center, and his daughter Nava, who was to be married the next day.

  Al-Zahar was a dead man.

  Shalom used the satellite phone to call Yoav Galant, the former commander of Flotilla 13, who had participated in many targeted killing operations and was now serving as the prime minister’s military secretary. Galant woke up Sharon (India is two and a half hours ahead of Israel), who immediately approved a missile strike on al-Zahar’s home, but only after 8:30 the next morning—once the adults had gone to work, the schoolchildren were in class, and the streets were quiet.

  And what about al-Zahar’s family? In the atmosphere following two gruesome attacks in six hours that had horrified Israel, no one really paid much attention to this question.

  In the morning, Turban’s sensors detected al-Zahar making a call from his home, using the line in his office on the second floor.

  The JWR notified Shalom. Seconds later, another report came in from Turban: The call was an interview al-Zahar was giving to the BBC Arabic service. Shalom was worried about the impact of a hit during a live broadcast—“God forbid the boom would be heard”—and ordered it postponed until the interview was over. The JWR personnel listened in until they heard al-Zahar hang up.

  Since it was a landline phone with a single outlet, and since al-Zahar’s voice was clearly identified by Turban’s skilled listeners and by the BBC interviewer, al-Zahar’s “death warrant” was approved—even though no Shin Bet agent or camera had actually seen al-Zahar in his office. Two Apaches fired a total of three missiles, demolishing the house, killing al-Zahar’s son Khaled, twenty-nine years old, and a bodyguard, and badly injuring his wife. But al-Zahar was only scratched: He’d been out in the garden with a cup of coffee, a cigarette, and a cordless phone.

  —

  OPERATION PICKING ANEMONES WASN’T working nearly as well in practice as it had in theory. Israel had missed several important targets, while Hamas had retaliated with two suicide bombers, sixteen dead, and seventy-five wounded. And although various anti-terror measures adopted by Israel, including the targeted killings of Hamas operatives, had led to some decrease in the number of Israelis killed and injured, Operation Picking Anemones wasn’t having the desired effect on the number of terror attempts. Hamas political figures might have been spooked, but the organization did not run out of people willing to become a shahid.

  The debate in the defense establishment intensified—what should be done about Sheikh Yassin? Ayalon’s musings about snakes and cutting off heads notwithstanding, it seemed increasingly clear that Hamas’s leader would have to be neutralized.

  The Shin Bet and Sayeret Matkal collaborated on a complicated plan to abduct and imprison him. But that idea was dropped, because any such operation would almost certainly require a gunfight, and a gunfight meant that soldiers, civilian bystanders, or the sheikh himself could be hit. It also wasn’t at all clear that Sheikh Yassin’s return to prison would even stop the suicide bombings. Israeli officials remembered that his long period of incarceration (which ended in the humiliating deal with King Hussein following the failed attempt to kill Khaled Mashal) had been rife with acts of murder and abductions by Hamas aimed at freeing him, along with waves of suicide bombings.

  The only effective way to deal with Yassin, many argued, was to kill him.

  But Israeli decision-makers were much more hesitant about pulling the trigger when it came to Yassin, despite the fact that everyone agreed that he was actively involved in directing and planning Hamas terror. True, Israel had nearly killed him the previou
s year during the “Dream Team” meeting, but that meeting included military operatives, too. Assassinating him, and him alone, was a completely different matter. Sheikh Yassin was a founder of the Hamas movement, a political leader of world renown, and a religious figure accepted throughout the Middle East.

  In a discussion in November, Avi Dichter argued, “Assassinating this particular individual is liable to set the Middle East ablaze and bring upon us waves of terror from outside our borders.” Major General Amos Gilad, director of policy and political-military affairs at the Ministry of Defense, was known for his hawkish views, but he also objected. “Sheikh Yassin is the exact paradigm of an ideologue of death, an architect of endless murder,” he said. But he concurred with those who feared a conflagration across the entire Islamic world in response to the slaying of someone perceived as a Muslim spiritual leader.

  Yaalon countered that Yassin was not seen as a spiritual leader, and killing him would not cause any response, beyond angry condemnation. “It’s inconceivable that we should go in circles around him, killing everyone else,” he said, “and not strike at him.”

  Defense Minister Mofaz adopted an even harsher approach: “Not only must we hit him, but I also have no problem doing it with a ‘high signature’ ”—that is, leaving no doubt that Israel had carried out the assassination.

  Although Sharon agreed in principle with Yaalon and Mofaz, Dichter was his senior adviser on terrorism and targeted killings, and even the assertive Sharon seemed to have lost a bit of his confidence in light of the opposition from Dichter and others.

  Major General Giora Eiland raised an additional cause for worry: bad PR. Was it not a problem for Israel to kill “an elderly, pitiable, half-blind cripple in a wheelchair? Won’t we look like the Wild West?” Sharon was not really concerned, but he did ask to hear additional opinions.

  The IDF’s philosopher in chief, Asa Kasher, supported Yaalon: “The distinction between political and military echelons fostered by international human rights organizations would also have left Hitler immune to attack for a significant period of time. The distinction between the echelons is particularly dubious when it comes to terrorist organizations.” On the other hand, the military advocate general was emphatically opposed. Since Finkelstein and Daniel Reisner formulated the rules for targeting killings three years earlier, Reisner and his staff had been present for many of the actions, providing legal backing for them. In some cases, they ordered the postponement of an operation out of fear of injuring innocents. In the case of Yassin, for the first time, their strong opposition stemmed from the identity of the targeted person. The growing importance accorded to Reisner’s opinion was due partly to the establishment of the International Criminal Court during that period. Senior officials in Israel began to worry about being indicted for targeted killings and sought legal support.