Bus on Jaffa Road

by Mike Kelly

  Hasson hung up. Within minutes he was in his car, speeding toward Hebron.

  An hour later, Hasson walked into the man’s hospital room. The man was groggy but awake. Hasson paused for a second or two by the door to the room to study the man’s features. He was short, stocky, with a receding hairline, a patchy beard, and a protruding nose.

  Hasson did not recognize the man. He was, as Hasson later concluded, a new operative who had never been photographed by Shin Bet.

  Hasson stepped closer to the bed. Like many Shin Bet veterans who had devoted their careers to tracking down suspected terrorists in the Palestinian villages of the West Bank and throughout the Gaza Strip, Hasson spoke fluent Arabic.

  “Shoo issmak?” Hasson asked.

  “What is your name?”

  The man did not hesitate to answer.

  “Hassan Salameh.”

  Salameh writhed in the hospital bed as his anesthesia wore off and the stinging pain returned. Doctors placed an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. Salameh shook his head from side to side and seemed in no mood to say anything more than his name. Yisrael Hasson was not worried. A longer interrogation could wait until Salameh felt better. For now, he had what he needed—a name.

  And what a name it was. The most wanted man in Israel, who masterminded the most devastating terror attacks in more than a generation, had been captured—by accident.

  For the first time in more than two months Israeli authorities felt they had been blessed by luck. This was a major break in a case that not only had confounded them but also had been the focus on an intense investigation and accompanying fear that another suicide bombing was being planned. They had already arrested other Hamas followers who had participated in the bombings on Jaffa Road and in Ashkelon. But Salameh was the ringleader, the bomb-maker, and the deputy commander of Hamas’s military wing—the al-Qassam brigade. Based on the fact that Israeli soldiers found other explosives and guns in Salameh’s car, Shin Bet’s investigators felt relieved that they had probably prevented yet another bombing from taking place.

  Because of the Sabbath, which began around 8 p.m. on Friday—roughly an hour after Salameh was arrested at the hospital—and extended to sunset on Saturday, Israeli authorities were in a bind. They had major news to proclaim and wanted a large TV audience. But they did not want to interrupt the Sabbath. So they waited twenty-four hours to announce Salameh’s capture.

  Just after the Sabbath concluded at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Israeli Major General Uzi Dayan called a press conference to announce that Salameh had been arrested. “We’ve settled the blood feud,” Dayan said.

  In hindsight, Dayan’s comment seems exaggerated. The larger conflict between Israelis and Palestinians was far from settled. But Dayan’s words underscored the fact that Israeli military leaders and Shin Bet counterterrorism teams felt an immense sense of relief that a temporary checkpoint on the streets of Hebron and a random search of a car resulted in the capture of such a high-ranking Hamas operative. “We were in a long run after Hassan Salameh,” Dayan said. “We do know that he was planning other terror activities when we captured him.”

  As he spoke to journalists, Dayan stood in front of maps and aerial photographs of Hebron and its narrow streets. He said the army had no prior intelligence that Salameh was planning to drive into Hebron. “Salameh’s capture was achieved because of our massive, twenty-four-hour-a-day security activity,” Dayan said. Asked if Salameh’s wound was serious, Dayan said: “All I care about is whether or not he can talk.”

  Regardless of whether Salameh would provide helpful information to counterterrorism investigators, his arrest was already being trumpeted as a political victory. For months, Israeli political polls showed a diminishing lack of trust among voters that Prime Minister Shimon Peres’s support of the Oslo peace process would actually bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians. With national elections scheduled for May 29 and with Peres’s once-commanding lead over challenger Benjamin Netanyahu reduced to single digits, the capture of Hassan Salameh was viewed by the Peres campaign as a possible boost for the embattled prime minister and a welcome response to critics who said his administration was not taking the terrorist threat seriously.

  Certainly Peres seemed delighted. “This relieves the pressure,” Peres said of Salameh’s capture. “This man really was a ticking time bomb.”

  Hamas did not hesitate to respond and attempt to dilute Israel’s sense of victory. Soon after General Dayan and Prime Minister Peres spoke, Salameh’s colleagues in Hamas’s al-Qassam military wing vowed revenge for the capture of their deputy commander. “The Qassam brigades will not hesitate to carry out the strongest revenge against the cowardly Zionists for this ugly crime,” Hamas announced in a leaflet.

  With dozens of Israeli soldiers on the streets outside, Salameh remained at al-Alia Hospital in Hebron for another day. But he needed more surgery to repair the bullet wound to his buttocks by a more experienced surgeon who had dealt with his share of bullet wounds. So under heavy guard and while most people in Israel and on the West Bank were asleep, Salameh was transferred to Hadassah University Hospital Ein Kerem in Jerusalem. It was after 2 a.m. when Salameh was wheeled into Hadassah, where his new surgeon would be the same man who had patched the wounds of the victims of Salameh’s bloody handiwork on the Number 18 bus on Jaffa Road almost three months earlier, Dr. Avi Rivkind.

  That Israeli’s top trauma surgeon would be asked to operate on Israel’s most wanted terrorist was no surprise. Hadassah Medical Center had long prided itself on treating patients without paying attention to religion or nationality. When he walked into the operating room and examined the Palestinian man who had just been brought from the hospital in Hebron, Rivkind had no idea of Salameh’s notoriety.

  “I did not know it was Hassan Salameh. No one told me,” Rivkind said later. “I didn’t pay attention. We work and then we ask the questions. I didn’t ask who it was.”

  Salameh didn’t talk either.

  During his career, Rivkind had come to expect patients to question him, with the questions ranging from “Will I survive?” to “Can someone call my boss?” But what surprised Rivkind about the Palestinian man lying on the gurney was his silence. Rivkind knew some basic Arabic words that he often used in treating Palestinian patients. He asked Salameh to breathe deeply, for example. Salameh took a deep breath. But other than following a few fundamental commands, Salameh never spoke.

  “He did not speak one word,” Rivkind said. “Nothing. It’s not the relationship I’m used to with my patients.”

  Nevertheless Rivkind quickly diagnosed Salameh’s problem. Salameh’s colon had been torn by the single rifle bullet that had passed through his buttocks. Rivkind donned a surgeon’s gown and walked into the operating room and, over several hours, he delicately repaired Salameh’s colon.

  After the surgery, Salameh was wheeled to a private room. Two Shin Bet agents kept watch inside the room and another guarded the door from the hallway as Hassan Salameh slept.

  Three days later, he talked.

  On Tuesday morning, May 21, 1996, Sergeant Major Yosy Ohayon of the Israeli police, walked into Salameh’s hospital room. As with many law enforcement agencies across the world, the Israeli police have established a set of protocols for interrogating prisoners.

  Sergeant Ohayon first identified himself then read an eighty-four-word statement to Salameh in Arabic, summarizing the charges against him—namely, that he was “suspected of being a member” of the al-­Qassam Brigade and that Israeli authorities were now accusing him “of sending people who committed suicide terrorist attacks” in which forty-six people were killed. As if that were not enough, Sergeant Ohayon added a not-so-small postscript: Salameh had also been charged with illegal possession of weapons and explosives.

  “You do not have to say a word unless you wish to,” Ohayon told Salameh. “However, anything you say will be written by
me and may be used as evidence.”

  And so, Salameh began to tell his story.

  Israeli police records indicate that Salameh participated in four interviews—the first on May 21, 1996, with Sergeant Ohayon at Hadassah University Hospital Ein Kerem, and others in July, August, and December of 1996 at other locations. There is no hint in the transcripts that Salameh paused or asked for time to ponder Ohayon’s instructions or asked to contact an attorney, or even whether he felt he needed an attorney. Taken together, the transcripts, along with his public statements during subsequent court appearances, and in a 1997 TV interview and a later interview with this author, show him not only willing to talk about his work as a Hamas operative and bomb-maker but occasionally seeming to brag about his various missions and how he trained for them. He spoke easily and concisely, his thoughts connecting from one episode to the next without the halting, clipped phrasing or one- or two-word answers of a man who was being forced to talk or was merely going through the motions of answering questions.

  At times, he seemed arrogant and self-congratulatory, enthusiastic about his record of bloodletting. But mostly he was chillingly pedantic in his matter-of-fact recitation of details, from the names of other Hamas operatives who worked with him, the types of cars that transported him to meetings to discuss “operations,” to his own cold-blooded explanations of how he built his bombs and recruited young men to carry them aboard buses and kill themselves while killing others.

  In that initial session with Sergeant Ohayon, Salameh did not begin with a recounting of the bombings on Jaffa Road, which had dominated debate in Israel’s election campaign and cast doubt on the future of the Oslo peace process. Salameh started his story before Oslo had even been signed, as if he wanted the full story and its context to be known before he described the bombings.

  It was 1992, in the dusty Khan Yunis refugee camp about twenty miles south of Gaza City on the Gaza Strip where Salameh’s family lived after fleeing a Palestinian village near Ashkelon after Israel declared its independence four decades earlier. Salameh had just turned twenty-one. He was unmarried, with only a few college credits earned in classes at Gaza’s Islamic University. He decided to drop out and make a career change. He joined the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas.

  The decision hardly seemed out of character for Salameh. His first venture into the complicated social, spiritual, economic, and political quicksand of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began several years before. It was December 1987 and across the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Palestinians revolted against two decades of Israeli occupation in what became known as “the Intifada,” or the uprising. Eventually, thousands of Palestinians would join in a variety of violent and nonviolent strikes, armed confrontations and other forms of protest against Israelis across the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. From its initial stirrings in December 1987, the Intifada continued another six years, until just before the Oslo accords were signed. (A “Second Intifada” erupted in 1998 and lasted until 2004.)

  Some Palestinians attacked with bombs, guns, or knives. But most reached to the ground around them and picked up rocks to throw. Rock throwing at Israelis, especially by Palestinian teenagers, grew into a near-daily activity and became the most common method of protest. Palestinians tossed rocks at Israeli cars, buses, schools, army convoys, police checkpoints, homes, and synagogues—almost any target imaginable.

  When the Intifada erupted, Hassan Salameh was sixteen. His hometown of Khan Yunis, which had about thirty-five thousand residents at the time, was only a few miles from Israel’s Gush Katif beach settlements, including the community of Kfar Darom, where Alisa Flatow was heading when she was killed. On many days, Salameh and other Palestinian youths would make their way to spots along the roads leading to Gush Katif to throw stones, especially near the Kissufim Junction.

  Salameh’s family said he was frequently arrested by Israeli authorities and even shot in the pelvis by an Israeli solider during a rock-throwing protest in 1988. When he spoke to Sergeant Ohayon or to other Israeli interrogators, Salameh was hardly shy about his exploits as a Palestinian street protestor or, later, in more violent operations supported by Hamas. But none of the transcripts indicate that Salameh had been shot or arrested by the Israelis before he was wounded and apprehended in Hebron.

  By late 1992, the Intifada had reached a pinnacle—perhaps a breaking point for Israelis. Protests had become noticeably more violent. After six Israeli security officers were killed in a series of confrontations in early December 1992, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin embarked on one of the most drastic security measures since the founding of Israel more than forty years before. Israeli authorities had already begun to arrest Palestinian protestors—and suspects—and place them in camps that were surrounded by barbed-wire fences and guard towers manned by Israeli soldiers. But beginning on December 16, Israeli authorities designated more than four hundred Hamas supporters in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as “inciters” who “endanger human lives by their activities.”

  The four hundred were not processed through Israel’s courts or even formally charged with crimes. They were simply put on buses and driven north toward Lebanon. Israeli human rights activists were aghast, as were Palestinian leaders. After court challenges failed to stop the caravans, the buses crossed into Lebanon and ordered the four hundred Hamas members off, then headed back to Israel.

  The Hamas deportees were told to stay put. Israeli border guards had orders to stop them from returning to the West Bank or to the Gaza Strip. The Lebanese government, meanwhile, refused to admit them. But Lebanon’s Hezbollah party accepted them and brought them into a variety of camps and villages that dotted the border between Lebanon and Israel.

  What happened in those camps during the next two years would eventually affect the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in profound ways.

  The Hezbollah hosts and the Hamas guests were Muslims, but from two distinct Islamic traditions. Most Hezbollah members were Shiites and followed many of the religious dictates of Islamic clerics in Iran; most Hamas members were Sunni Muslims and were more closely afflliated with the theology embraced by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Both opposed the existence of the State of Israel. But the two groups differed in modes of Islamic worship and in some aspects of Islamic theology, notably the Islamic definitions of martyrdom and suicide.

  In Lebanon, Hamas Sunnis learned of a new form of warfare that had long been embraced by the Hezbollah Shiites—suicide attacks against so-called infidels. A decade earlier, Hezbollah had carried out the suicide truck bombing of the US Marine encampment in Beirut. Other suicide operations followed.

  What is significant about those attacks is how the Hezbollah operatives who blew themselves up were honored for their suicides. They were not merely labeled valiant soldiers, willing to sacrifice themselves. They were called martyrs—shaheeds.

  While the link between suicide and martyrdom had a centuries-long tradition within the Shiite branch of Islam, Sunni members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip had been reluctant to embrace the idea of suicide. Simply put, the Koran banned suicide.

  When it came to suicide attacks, however, Hezbollah’s Shiite clerics embraced a different Koranic theology. Hezbollah equated any sort of attack against infidels—even if the so-called infidels were unarmed—as the equivalent of martyrdom. While Islamic attackers might deliberately kill themselves as a way of killing infidels, as the Hezbollah driver of a bomb-laden truck had done in the attack on the Marines in Beirut, their deaths were seen as a form of martyrdom worthy of the highest honors in Islam.

  There is no reliable account of whether Hamas members engaged in theological discussions about martyrdom and suicide with their Hezbollah hosts in Lebanon. However, one of Hamas’s founders and theological leaders, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, embraced this new concept of martyrdom and played a major role in promoting a theology that reclassified Hamas suicide bombers as
shaheeds, or martyrs who die for the sake of Allah. In Islamic tradition, suicide is not only forbidden but is considered one of the worst sins a Muslim can commit. By contrast, a shaheed was given an exalted status in Paradise. The theological shift, promoted by Yassin and others, was no small endeavor, as Israelis and others would soon discover.

  In mid-December 1996—almost ten months after the Number 18 bus attack on Jaffa Road—an Israeli researcher gained permission to interview Sheik Yassin in his prison cell. What emerged in the interview by Dr. Anat Berko was a succinct and fearsome explanation of the new theology of martyrdom being embraced by Hamas. After beginning her interview by discussing the meaning of justice, self-defense of one’s homeland, freedom of religion, the interpretation of peace treaties between Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, and the Islamic concept of Jihad, Berko, who was researching her doctoral thesis on suicide bombers, shifted gears.

  “What makes Muslims want to commit suicide for the sake of a certain goal?” she asked Yassin.

  “Here your understanding is wrong,” Yassin replied. “The person who kills himself in (one of) many ways by shooting or taking drugs or to escape from life and its problems, because of personal distress, that is suicide, but the person who goes to fight an enemy, who fights him who took his land, his country or who took his property, fights him and is killed, such a person is considered a shaheed and not someone who committed suicide.”

  Berko asked about the death of a shaheed and what it means.

  “It is not a question of ‘dead’ since the shaheed is not dead,” Yassin answered. “He is alive with Allah. First and foremost, the faith of a Muslim, of an Arab, is that he believes that anyone who is with Allah is in better circumstances than if he were in this world.”

  Most Palestinians did not initially embrace this new theology. In March 1996, a month after the Number 18 bus bombing on Jaffa Road, a poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah found that only 21.1 percent of Palestinians living in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip expressed support for suicide bombings. A year later, another poll found that 32.7 percent of Palestinians supported suicide attacks. By October 2003, 74.5 percent of Palestinians—three out of four—looked favorably on suicide attacks.