Nevertheless, Yaalon persisted, and the matter was taken up with the attorney general’s office, the highest professional legal authority in Israel. It was the first time that the targeted killing of a specific person had come before this forum for discussion.
AMAN and Shin Bet officials brought with them the Red Page—all the evidence that had accumulated against Yassin: the founding of Hamas, virulent preaching against the existence of Israel, establishment of the terrorist apparatus, prior convictions on charges of ordering the abduction and murder of Israeli soldiers in the 1980s, acquisition of weaponry, fundraising for military activities, advocacy of suicide terror, and more.
Finkelstein and Reisner argued that, with all due respect to the Red Page, targeted killings were not meant to be carried out as revenge or punishment, but only in order to prevent a future attack.
There was no recent indication in the intelligence material that Yassin was involved directly in terror. “But that’s because he knows we are keeping close track of him,” argued an AMAN representative. “Therefore, he’s being very careful not to say anything on the telephone or via any other electronic means.”
Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein endorsed the military advocate general’s position and stated that he would not approve the assassination until clear-cut evidence was provided that linked Yassin directly to terror and “that would stand up in court.”
—
SHORTLY THEREAFTER, ON JANUARY 14, 2004, a young woman from the Gaza Strip, twenty-one years old, tried to enter into Israel at the Erez Crossing. She had to pass through a metal detector, like all Palestinians. There was a high, pinging beep-beep-beep-beep when she went through the detector. “Platin, platin,” she told the border guards, pointing at her leg—a platinum implant.
The guards sent her through again, then a third time. The detector kept beeping. A female guard was summoned to frisk her. She then detonated a bomb that killed four examiners and wounded ten other people.
The woman’s name was Reem Saleh Riyashi. She had two children, one three years old, the other only eighteen months.
A day later, Sheikh Yassin called a press conference at the home of one of his followers. He sat in his wheelchair, wrapped in a brown blanket, with a large wreath in the form of a heart carrying the inscription HAMAS in the background. He was smiling. “For the first time,” he said, “we have used a woman fighter instead of a man. This is a new development in the struggle against the enemy.” The sheikh, who in the past had issued several fatwas (religious edicts) against the use of female suicide bombers, said he had changed his mind. “The holy war obligates all Muslims, men and women. This is proof that the resistance will continue until the enemy is driven out of our homeland.”
For Israel, such a shift in tactics was menacing. “We asked ourselves: How will we be able to cope with waves of female suicide bombers coming into the country?” Defense Minister Mofaz said. There are standards of decorum, even in a dirty war. “It is much harder to examine women and prevent explosives from being brought in.”
In addition to Yassin’s statement, AMAN was able to present Attorney General Rubinstein with transcripts of secret recordings made by 8200’s Turban base, of Yassin telling his operational staff that women could be used as suicide bombers. “We had clear intelligence-based evidence of the direct link between the political leadership of Hamas, headed by Sheikh Yassin, and the planners and executors of the terror attacks,” said Farkash.
Rubinstein was persuaded: Yassin could legally be killed. The security cabinet convened to decide. Shimon Peres was still opposed: “I feared that they would start trying to kill Israeli leaders,” he later said. “I thought that it was precisely with him that we would be able to reach a peace agreement.”
But by a majority of one, the ministers determined that he was a terrorist leader. “I was not impressed by the warnings that the earth would tremble or the skies fall in because of this assassination,” said Ehud Olmert, then the minister for trade, industry, and communications, who was part of the majority.
In a procedure that had already become routine, the cabinet left it up to Sharon and Mofaz to approve the proposals of the IDF and Shin Bet concerning when and how to carry out the hit. Sharon’s aides told U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that Yassin had become a legitimate target from Israel’s point of view. “A pretty tough argument ensued,” Weissglass said. “They were worried there’d be a general flare-up in the Middle East.”
In public appearances, Sharon also dropped hints that he now saw Yassin as a target. This only led to a tightening of the security around the Hamas leader. He stayed home, emerging only to visit a mosque and his sister’s home, both of which were near his house. Movement between the three points was in two vans, one equipped with a lift for Yassin’s wheelchair, while his armed bodyguards traveled in the second. His life was confined to this triangle, and he and his people assumed that Israel would not dare strike at any of its vertices, each of which was crowded with women and children and, in the case of the mosque, innocent civilians.
But there were spaces in between those three points. On the evening of March 21, Yassin was driven to prayers at the mosque, his bodyguards following in a second van.
Mofaz ordered that both vehicles be destroyed on their way back. There were choppers in the air and UAVs buzzing overhead, and Yassin’s son, Abd al-Hamid, had been around long enough to sense the danger. He raced to the mosque.
“Father, do not leave here,” he warned. “They [the Israelis] will not attack a mosque.”
The sheikh and his bodyguards decided to be cautious and remain in the mosque.
Hours went by. The JWR and all the forces remained on alert, with the air force keeping shifts of drones and attack helicopters in the air, relieving them when they ran out of fuel. The sheikh went to sleep on a mattress on the floor of the mosque, waking up early because it was uncomfortable. After the dawn prayers, he wanted to go home. “Helicopters could not be heard above,” his son said. “Everyone was sure the danger had passed.”
Still, it was a risk. To confuse the trackers, they decided to bundle the sheikh in his wheelchair and then run to his home. The van would only draw attention. “To tell the truth, I did not think they’d fire at a cripple’s wheelchair,” Hamid said.
The trackers were still there, of course, the drones still watching through thermal-imaging cameras. People came out the front door, moving quickly past the vans parked by the entrance, pushing a wheelchair.
Air force commander Halutz could not authorize opening fire, because Defense Minister Mofaz’s orders allowed him to fire only at the two vans.
“Mr. Minister,” Halutz said, “we do not have framing of the vans, but we do see a group of bodyguards running with a wheelchair and someone wearing a kaffiyeh in it. Do we have authorization?”
Mofaz asked him to speak to the Apache pilot and ask him if he could clearly see the wheelchair and whether he could hit it.
“I see them very clearly,” the pilot said. “I can take them out.”
“I authorize,” said Mofaz.
“Rashai,” Halutz radioed the pilot.
On the video feed, there was a flash, then a fraction of a second of blank screen. Then parts of the wheelchair flew in all directions, one wheel soaring upward and landing outside the frame, and people lying or crawling on the ground.
“Request permission for supplements,” the pilot said.
“Permission granted,” Mofaz answered.
Another missile hit the ground, killing anyone who was still alive.
Mofaz called Sharon, who was waiting tensely at his home on Sycamore Farm for the outcome of the operation. “We have video,” he said. “Judging by the pictures, it looks good. We hit the bull’s-eye, but let’s wait for reports from additional sources.”
Within a few minutes, the duty monitors at
Turban reported that Hamas’s communications channels were bursting with traffic. “Sheikh Yassin has become a shahid, along with a number of his bodyguards,” the organization’s members were telling one another. His son, Abd al-Hamid, was badly wounded. Sharon ordered that his staff be woken up to prepare to handle the fallout.
News of the assassination was received with deep concern in Washington. “They’re on the verge of hysteria,” Weissglass reported to Sharon. He told Rice not to worry, that Israel expected the Arab world’s response to be condemnation and nothing more. “Condi,” he said, in his calm and persuasive voice, “even in the Palestinian Authority, we do not anticipate anything unusual. They have declared three days of national mourning, but all the stores are open. It’s going to be all right.”
—
ONCE THE DAYS OF national mourning ended, Hamas’s supreme leadership body, the Shura Council, appointed Abd al-Aziz Rantisi to succeed Yassin. He was sworn in on a soccer field in one of the Gaza refugee camps. Sitting on a dais before a large crowd, the entire leadership of the organization watched a parade of uniformed militiamen and kissed the new leader’s hand. “We’ll fight the enemy everywhere, we’ll teach it the meaning of resistance,” Rantisi declared in his maiden speech, and he vowed to avenge the slaying of Yassin.
The Israelis were aware of the plans for the parade and ceremony, but Sharon ordered the Shin Bet and the air force to hold their fire, for fear of hitting civilians and because it was clear that foreign TV networks would be there and would broadcast any Israeli attack live.
Nevertheless, by that point, Sharon had already authorized the new leader’s assassination. This decision was much easier. Rantisi lacked Yassin’s religious authority, and he wasn’t an internationally recognized Arab political figure. His involvement in terror was indisputable, and, most important, the precedent had been set—now any Hamas leader could be liquidated.
Rantisi was cautious and tried to be deceptive, squirreling from one hideout to another, wearing wigs and using different code names on his cellphones. But Turban had no difficulty keeping tabs on him. On April 17, only a couple of weeks after being placed in charge of Hamas, he went home to make the final arrangements for the marriage of his son, Ahmed. It was a brief visit: He gave his wife the cash she needed to complete the preparations, then he left.
He was driving down Al-Jalaa Street when a Brushlet missile exploded into his Subaru.
A crowd of hundreds gathered around the charred remnants of the vehicle. A first-aid team tried in vain to save the lives of Rantisi and the two aides who were with him. A photograph distributed by the Reuters agency showed the screaming and weeping crowd, with one man holding his hands, smeared with the blood of the dead leader, up to the sky.
“He was a pediatrician who dealt mainly with the murder of children,” Mofaz told the press. Associates of Sharon’s made the implied warning explicit. “Arafat should take note,” one said, “that anyone whose business is terror should be very wary of his fate.”
The killing of Rantisi was the 168th targeted killing operation since the beginning of the intifada, in late 2000. By that point, Operation Picking Anemones had successfully thrown Hamas into a state of shock and confusion. The Shura Council immediately appointed a successor to Rantisi, but he was a minor figure whose name was kept classified so that he wouldn’t end up dead, too. All of the senior Hamas officials took extreme measures to remain under Israel’s radar, effectively spending most of their time just trying to stay alive.
“The Zionist enemy has succeeded in assassinating many of the fighting brothers, and this at a time when we badly need each and every pure fighter,” a declaration on the Hamas website stated. “There is no doubt at all that negligence is one of the main reasons for the enemy’s success, because the electronic spy planes never leave the skies of Gaza. The many eyes assigned this task do not know sleep, and the Apache helicopters are ready and available with their missiles and waiting for the opportunity. You are a target for assassination every day, even every hour of the day.”
Two weeks after Rantisi was killed, General Omar Suleiman, the Egyptian intelligence minister and the most powerful man in the Cairo regime after President Mubarak, went to Israel for an urgent meeting with Mofaz, Yaalon, and Dichter. “I come with a message of conciliation,” Suleiman said. He presented Hamas’s proposal for a ceasefire, the gist of which was “no assassinations, no terror attacks.”
Mofaz thanked Suleiman for coming. He told him that, as always, Egypt’s efforts to bring about conciliation in the region were appreciated. But there was nothing more to discuss. Israel, he said, would not stop the targeted killings in general or the campaign to kill Hamas leadership in particular.
Suleiman grew angry. “I came all the way from Cairo and bring you an offer to stop the attacks. This is what you wanted. Why are you persisting?”
“Hamas wants a truce so it can grow stronger,” Mofaz said. “We have to defeat them, not allow them to breathe.”
Suleiman appealed to Sharon, who greeted him warmly but yielded no ground. “Our defense establishment’s position is that we must not agree to a ceasefire,” he said. “I cannot oppose my own generals.” He offered only that Israel would carefully monitor Hamas’s conduct.
Hamas activists tried to make it difficult for the Israeli drones and Apaches to find them. They moved only when necessary, used motorcycles, and tried to keep to narrow streets. It didn’t matter: Two were killed by missiles in Gaza on May 30, and another was killed in the Balata refugee camp two weeks later. On that same day, Suleiman came to see Sharon in person again, after intensive phone communications that had taken place since the previous visit. “Mr. Prime Minister, now you know their offer is serious and they have ceased attacking.”
Grudgingly, Sharon agreed to stop the targeted killings. Hamas ordered an absolute and immediate cessation of suicide attacks.
—
ARIEL SHARON NOW HAD the upper hand in the fight against terror. During that period, when the security situation became a bit calmer, he even began to consider a political solution to the historic conflict in the Middle East. His close affinity to President Bush and the deep relationship he developed with the entire American administration—predicated upon the trade-off of freezing settlements in exchange for carte blanche in targeted killings—made Sharon come to feel that the Americans sincerely wanted to help the State of Israel, and gave him some new realizations.
“Sharon reached the conclusion that it doesn’t matter who is sitting in the White House—they will always view the settlements as a significant problem,” said Weissglass.
And for Sharon, the settlements—which he had wholeheartedly promoted in his previous positions—were not a religious, ideological issue; rather, they were a security consideration. “The moment he understood that they’re a burden and not an advantage, he had no problem evacuating them and turning his back on the settlers.” Sharon, the sworn hawk, who had built his career on his aggressive policy toward the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular, “underwent a dramatic change,” Weissglass said. “He wanted to exit the stage as a battle-worn general who became a great peacemaker.”
However, Sharon still believed that there was one key obstacle to achieving this vision: Yasser Arafat. The prime minister had come to accept that there was no way to preclude the creation of an independent Palestinian state, but this didn’t decrease his loathing for their leader. He regarded Arafat as someone who “had established a regime of terror in the territories he ruled, training terrorists in an organized and state-sponsored way, inciting, funding, equipping, and arming them, and dispatching them to kill throughout Israel.” In a telephone conversation with Russian defense minister Sergei Ivanov, Sharon described Arafat as “a pathological liar, a murderer who ordered the killing of children, women, and infants.”
Israeli intelligence received a large portion of Yasser Arafat’
s archives when IDF forces captured part of his headquarters near Ramallah, and this material provided hundreds of footnotes to Sharon’s accusations. Arafat had ordered, in his own handwriting, the transfer of huge sums to support Fatah’s terror activities. The Palestinian president and his circle were also involved in an unprecedented amount of corruption. The documents indicated that Arafat repeatedly reneged on his promises to Israel and the international community to build a true democratic state with a modern economy and a single armed force. He failed to make the transition from the head of a guerrilla organization to the leader of a democratic state, and continued to manage the Palestinian Authority with the same methods of manipulation, corruption, and divide-and-conquer he employed in managing the PLO—all with the goal of ensuring his survival as the Palestinian leader.
As part of a plan to delegitimize Arafat, Sharon gave a few journalists (me and, subsequently, several non-Israeli journalists) access to these archives in order for them to be published throughout the world. He also gave a directive to transfer money from the Mossad director’s secret fund in order to help with the overseas publication of a book about these documents.
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