No Mission Is Impossible

by Michael Bar-Zohar

  In Ramallah. the IDF demolished the buildings of the Mukataa compound, except for the structure that housed Arafat himself. Fighters from the Egoz commando took positions in rooms along the corridor leading to Arafat’s office, while outside, Israeli tanks encircled the site. Sheltered within the Mukataa’s detention center were several fugitive criminals involved in terror activities against Israel. The head of Palestinian intelligence had ordered them clandestinely brought into Arafat’s compound, under the assumption that they would be safe there from the IDF. After a lengthy standoff, the Americans had intervened, and the fugitives were transferred to a prison in Jericho under British oversight.

  In Ramallah, the IDF had uncovered weapons labs and captured scores of fugitive men and materiel. Toward the end of the fighting, it had seized Marwan Barghouti, the commander of the Fatah armed faction, the Tanzim; Barghouti would be later sentenced to life in prison for his numerous terror attacks.

  The siege in Ramallah. (Yoav Guterman, GPO)

  From Ramallah, on to Nablus. Nablus was considered a stronghold of Palestinian resistance, and its Qasbah, a maze of narrow, tortuous streets and convoluted passages had become a source of dread for the IDF’s General Staff, which was deeply concerned with the risks of fighting there. Densely populated, the Qasbah contained booby-trapped homes, sniper positions and a great number of terrorists. Hundreds of them hid in the crooked alleys, IEDs were planted everywhere and gas containers were buried in the ground, ready to explode. The IDF elite soldiers braced themselves before approaching the Qasbah, expecting bloody surprises at every street corner.

  The assault on Nablus began on April 5, with the operation under the command of Brigadier General Yitzhak (”Jerry”) Gershon, chief of the Judea and Samaria Division. He orchestrated the movements of the paratrooper brigade, which came from the west; Golani, which approached from the south, and the armored Yiftach Brigade, which occupied the eastern part of the city, including its hostile refugee camps. The Palestinians had planted dozens of mines within delivery trucks and water tanks lining the roadways, and IDF engineers systematically defused them, one by one.

  The paratroopers attacked the Qasbah from all sides simultaneously. Their secret weapon was a revolutionary battle method: passing through walls. The paratroopers had developed various instruments allowing them to break walls with heavy sledgehammers or blow large holes in them and thus move from one house to another without even stepping into the murderous streets. That method had been used for the first time a month and a half earlier, during the seizure of the nearby Balata refugee camp. Aviv Kochavi, the commander of the paratrooper brigade, explained that, “in the crowded Qasbah, where the narrow streets contained numerous mines and obstacles, and where snipers could shoot from every corner, we developed an alternative system of fighting: we moved exclusively through the walls and buildings to surprise the enemy, who alone was left to circulate in the alleyways, becoming an exposed target. The strategy kept the enemy disoriented and vulnerable to our fire, which caught it off guard largely from the sides, from behind or from above.”

  In the Qasbah, the gangs of terrorists concentrated under a single command. Most of the fugitive Palestinian fighters, the majority of them Tanzim and the minority Hamas, had also holed up there. With great determination, the Palestinians fought with Kalashnikovs and M-16s, prepared to die as “martyrs.”

  But the soldiers of the IDF were also highly determined. The battle in the Qasbah moved from house to house. The goal was to limit, at all costs, the number of IDF fighters wounded in battle, and as a result, it was decided that a small operational force would be sent every few minutes to the houses where the terrorists were positioned. The terrorists would begin shooting, thereby exposing themselves to the fire of Israeli snipers waiting on the opposite side. The alleyways were left to the fugitive fighters, and the IDF made use of sniper positions in the homes. Israeli gunmen charged out of unexpected places and hit Palestinians who had prepared to fire on troops that were farther away.

  By the third day of the war, the IDF was already in control of two-thirds of the Qasbah. Lieutenant Colonel Ofek Buhris, the commander of the 51st Battalion, had been deployed to Nablus with his soldiers after fighting in the Mukataa and Jenin, and was in charge of locating explosives’ labs and capturing fugitives. He was assigned to entrap Ali Hadiri, one of Hamas’s senior engineers, who had prepared the explosive that blew up at the Park Hotel in Netanya. During the raid on the house where the terrorist was staying, a hail of gunfire burst from within, killing a company commander in the Golani Brigade and badly wounding Buhris. Golani soldiers broke into the house and killed Hadiri and another terrorist.

  On April 8 at about 7:00 A.M., all of a sudden, dozens of Palestinians emerged from one of the Qasbah houses, their arms in the air. The surrender of the terrorists had begun. Reports arrived hourly of additional groups turning themselves in; by the afternoon, further surrender deals were being proposed through the Shin Bet and the Civil Administration, Israel’s governing body in the West Bank. By six-thirty that evening, the last of the armed men had left the houses of the Nablus Qasbah, their arms raised and waving improvised white flags as a sign of surrender. After seventy-two hours of fighting, seventy terrorists had been killed and hundreds arrested.

  But the battle that would become most identified with Operation Defensive Shield would take place in Jenin, remembered because of the number of Israeli casualties—twenty-three dead and seventy-five wounded—and because of Palestinian claims of a massacre carried out by the IDF in the city’s refugee camp.

  The armed Palestinians, massed at the center of the camp, had laid a trap of thousands of explosive devices and had set up numerous ambushes in the camp’s narrow alleyways. Israel’s soldiers entered the camp with the assistance of tanks, assault helicopters and D9 bulldozers, which cleared explosives and opened booby-trapped doors. Progress was slow, with Palestinian snipers firing on the troops and making their advance difficult.

  On the seventh day of action, a group of reservists from the Nahshon Brigade were caught in an ambush that killed thirteen soldiers. Their comrades charged the terrorists in an effort to rescue the wounded, but that resulted in more injuries. In the raid’s aftermath, the IDF decided to change procedure and destroy every house in which terrorists could hide. The policy included a warning to armed Palestinian fighters to surrender before the bulldozers began their work, which convinced many, among them the most senior terrorists, to turn themselves in. A high-ranking member of Islamic Jihad, Mahmoud Tawalbeh, was killed after refusing to surrender, when a D9 bulldozer caused a wall to collapse on him in the house where he was hiding.

  During the fighting, rumors were spread of a massacre carried out by the IDF in Jenin’s refugee camp; the Palestinians even cited three thousand as the number killed. The international media accepted the Palestinian claims unquestioningly, until a UN investigative committee arrived on the scene and determined that the real figure was just fifty-six. The IDF claimed that the vast majority of the dead Palestinians were armed terrorists. It may be that the camp’s complete closure to the media caused the proliferation of the rumors throughout the world.

  The city of Bethlehem was seized by the Jerusalem reservist brigade. Immediately after their entry into Bethlehem, the troops detained dozens of fugitives and quickly gained control of the ancient town. But about forty armed terrorists barricaded themselves in the Church of the Nativity. The IDF, aware of the location’s great importance for the rest of the world, had sent the Shaldag commando unit to block off the terrorists’ entrance into the church. But the air force ran into delays while flying in the soldiers, and dozens of terrorists managed to hole up in the church, certain that the Israeli forces wouldn’t enter or arrest them.

  Leading the armed men was Colonel Abdallah Daoud, the head of Palestinian intelligence in Nablus, who took as hostages the forty-six priests staying in the church and roughly two hundred other civilians, among them children. The IDF imposed a blockad
e on the church for thirty-four days, disrupting the supply of food and water in order to break the will of the wanted men. The Vatican cautioned Israel not to damage the church.

  On May 10, 2002, the standoff concluded after Israel agreed to the expulsion of 13 of the fugitives to 6 European countries, as well as the transfer of 26 others to Gaza. During the blockade, six Palestinians were killed, and Israel captured documents revealing that the residents of Bethlehem, principally Christians, had suffered from harassment by armed men belonging to the Tanzim and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

  Over the course of Operation Defensive Shield, five of the six Palestinian cities in the West Bank were occupied. Within a short period, and at a cost of thirty-four dead soldiers, Israel succeeded in putting a stop to the vicious wave of terror, severely degrading the military capability of the Palestinian Authority, isolating Arafat, capturing a great number of fugitives and uncovering vast quantities of explosives and other weapons.

  AVIV KOCHAVI, COMMANDER OF THE PARATROOPERS BRIGADE AND LATER THE DIRECTOR OF MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

  “The battle of the Qasbah ended precisely on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The entire brigade was dispersed throughout the Qasbah and the rest of Nablus, after a series of intense battles and a decisive victory over the armed fighters. I decided that we wouldn’t give up on marking this special day. We set up a public address system and high-powered speakers, and turned on the radio at the moment of the memorial siren, which echoed through the entire area. Just hours after the end of the battle, all the soldiers of the paratroopers brigade stood at attention in memory of the victims.

  “It was a very emotional moment and has remained engraved in my memory for two reasons: first, because we proved—against the backdrop, fittingly, of Holocaust Remembrance Day—that there’s no place we won’t go in order to defeat terror and defend the citizens of Israel. And second, by implementing innovative, sophisticated tactics, we proved that it’s possible to do battle in a manner that is simultaneously resolute, professional and ethical, despite fighting in a built-up, crowded area against numerous terrorists. More than seventy terrorists were killed by the brigade, and hundreds were wounded or captured.

  “The battle ended with the surrender of the terrorists: after they were squeezed and surrounded on all sides, their leader called the representative of District Coordination, who was with me at the command post, and asked to organize his surrender with three hundred of his men. We arranged the terms, and the terrorists marched to a specified location, where they turned over their weapons and were arrested.”

  YITZHAK (“JERRY”) GERSHON, COMMANDER OF THE WEST BANK DIVISION AND LATER OF THE HOME FRONT COMMAND

  “An all-out war on terror was being waged in Judea and Samaria when I assumed my functions as commander of the West Bank Division. The IDF had been fighting terrorists for ten months but, for various reasons, hadn’t looked its best. I felt that the weighty task of providing security had been placed on my shoulders, and I understood that it was me and the forces under my authority who would make the difference. We changed the operational paradigm and led hundreds of special operations, some in refugee camps.

  “The change was felt on the ground and yielded meaningful operational successes. More and more commanders and decision makers at the level of the military staff reached the sensible conclusion that it was our obligation to decide the fate of this war that had been forced upon us.

  “When Defensive Shield was authorized, two operations of the most sensitive nature were assigned to us: Ramallah and Nablus. Ramallah was the site and seat of Arafat’s power and the center of the Palestinian Authority; Nablus was the terror capital. The character of the operations resembled that of the intensive activity that preceded Defensive Shield, requiring initiative and aggressiveness, determination and creative thinking. The operation highlighted the intelligent integration of all the components of military force, along with tight coordination with Shin Bet, the Internal Security Service.

  “Defensive Shield achieved a physical and psychological turning point in the Palestinian terror in Judea and Samaria.”

  In 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally retreats from the Gaza Strip. The Jewish settlements are evacuated and the settlers forced to leave their homes and seek new homes in Israel. The IDF pulls out all its forces from the Strip. Israel’s leaders hoped that Gaza, now fully independent, will devote all its efforts to building a thriving economy and a prosperous free society.

  The opposite happens. The Hamas terrorist organization seizes power in Gaza and turns it into a base of bloody, incessant attacks on Israel’s civilian population.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE NEVER-ENDING STORY IN GAZA: 2008, 2012, 2014

  “Cast Lead,” 2008

  On December 27, 2008, at 11:30 A.M., several F-15 jets of the IAF dived over scores of targets all over the Gaza Strip. The lead plane launched its missiles on Arafat City, a large government complex in the center of Gaza. The attack targeted a graduation ceremony for police cadets, most of them members of the “Izz al-Din al-Qassam,” Hamas’s death squads. The other jets, and a few helicopters, launched massive aerial bombings on roughly one hundred Hamas targets across the Gaza Strip. In a few minutes they pulverized command posts, armories, underground rocket and missile launchers, and the organization’s training sites. Operation Cast Lead had begun.

  This first round of bombing caught Hamas completely off guard and unprepared. One hundred fifty-five terrorists were killed, eighty-nine of them at the police graduation ceremony.

  As the campaign continued, the air force assaulted forty tunnels in the Philadelphi Corridor (a narrow strip along the border of Gaza and Egypt) with bunker-busting bombs, in order to disrupt the smuggling of arms from Egypt. Strategic targets were also blown up, the objective being to undermine Hamas rule: government offices, television studios, the central prison, the general intelligence building, the city hall in Beit Hanoun, the Islamic University and more.

  “We’re talking about a great number of aircraft in a very small area with the goal of attacking buildings in very crowded places, where any misfire could hit a school or nursery,” former IAF brigadier-general Ran Pecker-Ronen told the journalist Amir Bohbot. “Their accuracy was amazing, the execution perfect. I don’t believe there’s another air force in the world capable of carrying out these sorts of attacks at such a high level of precision.”

  The Israeli government, headed by Ehud Olmert, decided to launch Cast Lead after a large-scale, prolonged barrage of thousands of Qassam rockets on the towns and cities near Gaza. For many months, residents of the area had lived in fear, forced to sleep in safety rooms and bomb shelters. It was an absurd situation; no other nation in the world would have accepted being subjected to the daily firing of rockets on its civilian population. The cease-fire that had been reached via Egyptian mediation in June 2008 had collapsed completely, and Israel’s southern region was subject to a real war, in which Palestinians fired rockets, Israel responded with bombings by the air force, and the pattern continued. The residents of the south were paying the price.

  The objective of Cast Lead would be to end the Palestinian missile fire, destroy Hamas operational abilities and prevent its rearmament.

  The IDF received authorization to carry out targeted killings, and eliminated senior members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad one after another, among them Said Siam, the Hamas government’s interior minister; his brother Iyad Siam, another Hamas senior official; and Nizar Rayan, number three in Hamas’s political wing. Rayan was killed when his home was bombed from the air; he died along with eighteen friends and relatives who had stayed in the house in spite of the IAF warnings. The building in which he lived had served as a command post, communications center, storage facility for weaponry and ammunitions, and a tunnel entrance.

  The Southern District commander, General Yoav Galant, told the journalist Shmuel Haddad, “In the past, each Hamas commander built himself a three-story house, in which the basement level serv
ed as a storage area for materiel, the middle level as a command post, and the family lived on the third floor. For years, they assumed that the IDF wouldn’t strike the building because of the family. We’ve changed the paradigm, warning the family by a telephone call and by firing a small, harmless ‘knock on the roof’ warning missile. Later, the building is bombed, and from then on the Hamas terrorist is left to worry about the fact that he has neither a command station nor a home for his family.”

  On January 3, the IDF launched the operation’s second stage with the shelling of Gaza and the entrance of ground forces into the Strip’s northern end. The offensive was intended to seize missile-launching areas, to cut off Gaza City from the rest of the Strip and increase the damage that the IDF was inflicting on Hamas, principally at points where the air force had no advantage—like armories, tunnels, bunkers and underground command posts. Ten thousand reservists fought alongside twenty thousand regular soldiers.

  The forces fought primarily on built-up territory, facing ambushes, suicide bombers, and booby-trapped houses. It was a house-to-house—and, at times, face-to-face fight—battle. Homes used for terrorist activity or found to be booby-trapped were razed; during the fighting, roughly six hundred houses were destroyed.

  Israel’s offensive in Gaza began with the Golani, Givati and the paratrooper brigades breaking into the Strip from different and unanticipated directions. Merkava tanks of the armored 188th “Lightning” Brigade, which had defended the Golan Heights in the Yom Kippur War, blocked the passage from Rafiah and Khan Younis to Gaza City, thus disrupting the supply of arms to Hamas. The 401st Brigade, nicknamed “Iron Trails,” established a buffer zone in the center of the strip, by the former settlement of Netzarim. IDF engineers, often employing mini-robots, defused explosives and booby-trapped houses. Saving the soldiers’ lives was the mission’s top priority; consequently, massive efforts were spent preventing unnecessary risks, even at the cost of civilians being hit.