by Mike Kelly
“I wasn’t dancing in the streets,” Flatow said. He nevertheless wondered where the investigation into his daughter’s death might lead—if a thorough investigation was actually taking place.
As a lawyer, Flatow had been trained to see most events as following a logical progression. And yet, the investigation of his daughter’s killing seemed to have no clear pathway. Various political figures in the United States and in Israel—even in the Palestinian government—had promised a full investigation. But, aside from the killing of Fathi Shaqaqi, there was little to show for their efforts. Now, a full year after he buried his daughter, Flatow wondered if any significant effort had been made to catch the actual bombers in Gaza or whether all the principled statements by various leaders in Israel and in the US about the rule of law and the need for accountability had been set aside in the name of politics, diplomacy, and the desire to sculpt a peaceful settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
What Flatow did not know was that one of the Palestinian operatives who planted the bomb that killed Alisa was a member of a Hamas cell linked to Yahya Ayyash, the so-called “Engineer” whose killing by Israeli agents had been later cited as a reason for the bombing of the Number 18 bus in Jerusalem. As Ayyash was teaching bomb-making to members of the group responsible for the Alisa Flatow’s bus, another of his protégés, Hassan Salameh, was at work on his first bomb, this one also for a target in Gaza.
A month after Alisa’s killing, Salameh placed a bomb aboard a donkey cart near Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip. As the cart approached a bus stop, the driver pushed a button. Only the driver and donkey died. The incident barely made the news.
But Salameh learned a key lesson. When the bomb aboard the donkey cart detonated, it was not close enough to its target. The next time Salameh would make sure his bomber would be much closer.
Flatow had yet to hear of Salameh or even much about Ayyash. He held out little hope that his government—or other governments—were serious about catching his daughter’s killers. Certainly he did not see how going to the White House to watch Clinton sign the antiterrorism bill would lift the haunting sadness that griped him and members of his family.
“We were just not up to it,” Flatow said. “Emotionally, we couldn’t do it.”
Flatow felt deflated, unable to envison just yet what he might do to hold anyone accountable for Alisa’s murder.
He would soon change his mind.
Chapter 6
Alisa Flatow wanted to see Petra.
Just as Sara Duker and Matt Eisenfeld would hope to do ten months later, Alisa thought of taking a break from her studies in Jerusalem and riding a bus down the spine of Israel to the Negev desert, then crossing into Jordan at the port city of Eilat. From there, she would catch another bus along the eastern side of the Jordan River, a mostly treeless, rocky region of jagged peaks and meandering valleys that reach like veins and arteries along the Arabian Peninsula.
If she wanted, she could approach Petra just as the ancient Nabataeans had—by walking through a narrow canyon where the rocks seem to glow with the translucent hue of raw salmon. Then she could explore the ancient temple that had been cut into the rocks along with homes and burial vaults.
Israel was not entirely safe from terrorism. Yahya Ayyash had already become Israel’s most wanted fugitive after he was implicated in a half-dozen suicide bombings during the previous two years. Ayyash’s bombers mainly targeted buses or bus stops. In 1994, thirty-five Israelis had died—twenty-two of them in just one bus bombing in downtown Tel Aviv. For that attack, Ayyash introduced the deadly design that would later be adopted by Hassan Salameh: bombs made from Cold War–era explosives, antitank land mines that had been dug up in the desert along Egypt’s border and packed in a duffle bag with shrapnel of nails, screws, and ball bearings.
In January 1995, Ayyash struck again. This time, Ayyash formed an alliance between his Hamas followers and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. If PIJ would supply the suicide bombers, Ayyash and Hamas would build the bombs.
A vulnerable target was selected—the busy Beit Lid junction on a highway north of Tel Aviv where soldiers frequently congregated on Sunday to catch buses that would take them to their bases after weekend visits with their families. The junction also had a symbolic value for Ayyash and Hamas. Near its southwest corner sat Ashmoret Prison, where Israel had jailed Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the wheelchair-bound founder of Hamas who had helped to promote a new Islamic theology that sanctioned suicide attacks against Israelis. For this attack, Ayyash assembled three bombs.
The first bomb was carried by a Palestinian operative wearing an Israeli military uniform. He walked into a knot of soldiers waiting for a bus at the junction and pushed a button. Three minutes later, as the wounded cried in pain and bystanders who had not been hurt ran to help, another Palestinian operative walked up, also disguised as a soldier and seeming to want to tend to the wounded. Instead, he pressed the button on his satchel and more soldiers went down. In all, twenty soldiers and one civilian died.
The third bomb was found amid the carnage at Beit Lid. Police speculate that it might have been designed to explode when Israeli officials and political figures visited the scene, as they usually did after a major attack. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin walked by the unexploded bomb when he toured the site, unaware of how close he was to death.
If Alisa was worried about suicide bombers on buses, she did not mention it.
Just as Sara and Matt would later embrace what they believed to be a newfound freedom to travel in the wake of the Oslo Peace Accords, so Alisa wanted to cross the border from Israel as a Jew and visit a formerly hostile and off-limits archeological site in Jordan.
But she never made it to Petra; her friends could not make the trip, and Alisa did not want to travel alone. She chose Gaza instead.
At the time, the Gaza Strip was home to approximately one million Palestinians. Along with the West Bank, where another 1.6 million Palestinians lived, the Gaza Strip was considered a key piece in what Palestinians hoped might one day become a new nation. The Gaza Strip, however, was also home to some 6,300 Israeli Jews who built a string of communities along the beaches. For Israel, Gaza’s Jewish settlements had become an agricultural success, with all manner of vegetables grown, not just in the rich soil but inside expansive greenhouses too.
Alisa and two young women friends traveling with her were not interested in the farms. Gaza also had some of the most beautiful beaches along the Mediterranean, and, with Passover approaching and their schools on a short hiatus, Alisa and her friends decided to spend a few days swimming and soaking up the sun at the Gazan settlement of Gush Katif, which featured a hotel.
Just after dawn on the morning of April 9, 1995, a Sunday, Alisa picked up the telephone in her Jerusalem apartment and dialed the number for her parents’ home in West Orange, New Jersey. Her father, Stephen, answered.
It was still Saturday night on the East Coast of the United States. Stephen looked at the clock—11:30 p.m. in West Orange, but around 6:30 a.m. in Jerusalem.
The timing of the call did not bother him. Stephen and his wife, Roslyn, had opted for a late dinner. The meal they had ordered from a local kosher Chinese restaurant had just arrived.
Stephen noticed his daughter seemed happy, excited.
“What are you doing up so early,” he asked.
“Don’t you remember I’m going on vacation?” Alisa said.
Stephen knew that Alisa had been planning a spring break. He just didn’t know if she had selected a destination yet. He asked where she was going.
“Gush Katif,” Alisa said.
Stephen drew a blank. He knew the name, but couldn’t remember the location of Gush Katif.
“Where is that?” he asked.
“Gaza,” said Alisa.
Stephen paused. He felt the worry building inside him and handed the phone to his wife.
&nbs
p; Like many American Jews, Stephen Flatow encouraged his children to spend time in Israel, soaking up the culture and studying scriptures. But he insisted that his children follow several basic rules if they traveled anywhere within Israel: No hitchhiking; stick with buses or other forms of public transportation. Don’t travel alone. And make sure to select a definite destination; no aimless wandering.
When he heard his daughter say she was going to the Gaza Strip, Stephen knew she would have to pass through several militant Palestinian areas. He tried to keep calm and not raise his voice.
He asked how Alisa planned to get to Gaza.
Alisa described a route with a first leg similar to one that Sara and Matt would take—a local Jerusalem bus to the city’s central terminal. From there, a bus to Ashkelon, then another bus into the Gaza Strip. All the buses would be driven by Israelis, with the Israeli military keeping watch at checkpoints along the route.
He asked what was so special about the Gaza Strip that she would select it as a vacation spot. “She wanted to get a tan,” he said years later, remembering the conversation.
Stephen and Roslyn chatted for a few seconds. Certainly Alisa was following the rules—traveling on a bus with friends to a specific destination. They decided their daughter would probably be safe.
Stephen reached for the phone again.
“Call us when you get back on Wednesday,” he said, then hung up.
“You forgot to ask the name of the resort,” Roslyn said. “What if something happens?”
“Don’t worry,” Stephen said. “If something happens, we’ll definitely hear about it.”
He slipped into a deep sleep that night. “Like a baby,” Flatow recalled. When he awoke on Sunday morning, Flatow dressed quickly and headed out the door for the short drive to a synagogue where he usually joined a handful of other men for traditional morning prayers.
Alisa’s red Toyota Corolla sat in the driveway. Flatow opened the door and slipped behind the wheel. He turned the key in the ignition, then backed out and drove down his street. At the corner, he pushed a button to turn on the radio. Without Alisa around, Flatow kept the radio tuned to a New York City–based station that usually played nonstop rock and roll. But as Flatow turned at the corner to head to the synagogue, the steady diet of Elvis, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones was interrupted by a news report of Palestinian terrorists attacking a bus in the Gaza Strip.
Flatow felt sickened. “I knew right then and there,” he said. “I felt it inside me. I didn’t hear the sound of the explosion. I didn’t hear the sound of broken glass, but I knew that she was somehow involved. And I knew there was nothing I could do. She was in God’s care.”
Flatow drove to the synagogue, which was temporarily located in a residential house while a larger worship space was being constructed. As he walked in, he did not tell any of the other men about the radio report he had just heard. He wrapped the leather tefillin straps around one arm and his forehead, then draped his prayer shawl over his head as the men’s voices filled the room with one of Judaism’s oldest declarations of faith, the Shema.
“Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God. The Lord is one. Blessed be the name of his glorious kingdom for ever and ever . . .”
Flatow had selected a seat at the end of a row of chairs. As the men finished the Shema and began to recite a series of blessings known as the Shemoneh Esrei, Flatow heard a phone ring in the kitchen.
“I knew it was for me,” he said.
He left his seat, walked into the kitchen and grabbed the phone. It was Roslyn.
She had just received a call from the father of one of the women traveling to Gaza with Alisa. A bomb had exploded near the bus, and the father said his daughter and another young woman were back in Jerusalem—safe. Alisa was still at the scene, however. She may have been injured. The caller did not know.
Flatow told Roslyn he was coming home.
He walked back to his chair, and removed his prayer shawl and tefillin. “I’ve got to go,” he whispered to a friend.
Alisa grabbed the window seat just behind the driver in Ashkelon for the final leg of her trek to the beach hotel at Gush Katif.
Another woman who was traveling with her, Kesari Rusa, a student in Jerusalem, sat next to Alisa on the aisle. The third woman in their group, Chavi Levine, who was one of Alisa’s roommates in Jersusalem, grabbed a seat across the aisle. The three American women were among only a handful of female passengers. Most of the other seats were filled with Israeli soldiers, heading back to their bases in Gaza.
On the outskirts of Ashkelon, where the land flattens out, the bus turned onto a two-lane, southerly road and approached the Israeli checkpoint known as the Erez Crossing. Just south of Erez, the road takes a slight easterly course through alfalfa fields and past olive groves and away from Gaza City with its crowded Palestinian neighborhoods.
Only twenty-five miles long and no more than seven miles wide, the Gaza Strip looks like a sandy finger stretching along the Mediterranean Coast between Israel and Egypt.
On the southern end, a series of small Israeli farm communities dotted the landscape. Known as the Gush Katif block, the enclaves were protected by Israeli military units who guarded checkpoints to make sure that Palestinians did not attack Jewish residents. Getting to those checkpoints, however, meant that Israeli buses had to pass through neighboring Palestinian villages.
Just after noon on Sunday, April 9, 1995, Alisa’s bus approached the Israeli community of Kfar Darom, whose sixty families mostly tended fruit orchards. Just north of town a pickup truck, loaded with explosives, parked on the side of the road. As Alisa’s bus passed, the truck pulled onto the road and followed. After several minutes, the truck sped up, pulled alongside the bus and the driver pressed a button.
Kesari Rusa thought someone had thrown a rock at the bus. It was not uncommon for Palestinian residents of the West Bank or the Gaza Strip to demonstrate their opposition to Israelis by showering cars or buses with stones.
Rusa heard what she later told authorities sounded like a “dull sort of loud noise.” She looked to her left. The bus window had shattered.
Alisa fell into Rusa. Alisa’s eyes were open but blank, unblinking. Alisa’s hands had curled into balls.
The bus kept moving for another hundred meters, then rolled to a stop. In the rear of the bus, seven Israeli soldiers were slumped across their seats, dead. Fifty-two others were injured. Blood streamed from the faces and heads of many.
Several Israeli residents from Kfar Darom, including a man with a video camera, pried open the bus door. They pulled the living passengers off, then put Alisa on a stretcher. Several paramedics arrived and cut off Alisa’s blue denim skirt and white blouse. A medical helicopter landed. Alisa was placed on board for a ten-minute flight to Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba.
She had not spoken a word since the explosion, but she was breathing.
The drive from the synagogue took less than five minutes. As soon as Stephen Flatow walked in the door of his home, he reached for the phone and dialed the Israeli Consulate in New York City.
He got a busy signal.
Flatow found a telephone book and opened to the blue-colored pages that listed contact information for a variety of state and federal government offices. He scanned a column for federal agencies and found a Washington, DC, phone number for the US State Department.
A State Department operator answered. Flatow quickly ran through what he had heard—that there had been an attack on a bus in the Gaza Strip, that Alisa’s friends were allowed to return to Jerusalem but Alisa was kept at the scene, that he did not know his daughter’s condition and needed help finding information.
The operator switched Flatow to the State Department crisis center. A man answered. He took down the number of Alisa’s US passport and her Jerusalem address, then promised to call back.
Flatow looked at his
watch. It was just nine o’clock in the morning in New Jersey—four o’clock in the afternoon in Israel. Surely someone must know something definitive about Alisa.
Other friends began to call, asking why Flatow had suddenly left morning prayers at the synagogue after taking a phone call. Flatow explained what he knew—which wasn’t much. One friend promised to call his contacts in the Israeli Defense Ministry. Another promised to call friends involved in Jewish social services in Israel.
Flatow took out a legal pad and started writing down names and numbers he had called. He was trying to be logical—a lawyer framing out the dimensions of a potential problem to solve, not a father wrestling with sketchy information and wondering whether his daughter had been injured in a dangerous spot almost six thousand miles away.
“I was focused and directed,” he said. “I was someplace else.”
Flatow’s family—Roslyn, his son, Etan, and daughters, Francine, Ilana, and Gail—were now awake and trying to stay calm. “They didn’t know what to do. They were upset,” Flatow said.
The phone rang. It was 10:30 a.m. The man from the State Department was on the line. He had no new information but asked Flatow to stand by the phone and wait for a call from the US Embassy in Tel Aviv.
Thirty minutes passed. The phone rang again. An embassy staffer in Tel Aviv confirmed that Alisa had been taken to Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba. Other staffers from the embassy were driving there now and would call as soon as they arrived.
Another thirty minutes passed.
The phone rang again. Flatow recognized the Israeli accent of the man on the phone. It was a doctor at Soroka Medical Center.
The doctor started to explain Alisa’s condition, but Flatow cut in. The doctor’s command of the English language was so poor that Flatow could not understand what he was saying. Flatow asked for someone else to speak to. A woman picked up the line and offered to translate.