At the sound of the first explosion, Amina Farhat, Ghalib’s mother, sat bolt upright in bed. Could Amal and Hezbollah be fighting each other again?, she wondered. Her son, Ghalib, a former fighter with the Communist Party, immediately recognized that the explosions and rate of fire signaled something far more serious than another clash between the rival Shia groups.
“Get the children up,” Ghalib Farhat ordered Kholoud, his wife. The firefight was just two hundred yards up the road, and Ghalib figured that his mother’s two-story house next door would provide better protection than his simple bungalow. The terrified family ran outside and barged in through the back door of his mother’s home. As they took cover beneath the stairway, Ghalib noticed the flash and heard the report of a third explosion among the orange trees.
The third blast was caused by a bullet detonating explosives carried by Sergeant Itamar Ilya, the Israeli unit’s sapper. The explosives were intended for roadside bombs that the team planned to set up around Ansariyah. The blast tore Ilya into bloody fragments and killed more members of the team. Eleven of the sixteen naval commandos were now dead, with at least another four wounded.
As the firefight raged among the orange trees and the surviving Israeli commandos desperately radioed for support and evacuation, Hussein Younis, a baker from the nearby village of Msaylah, drove his BMW toward Ansariyah, completely unaware of the fighting ahead of him. In the backseat was Samira, a young married woman with whom he was having an affair. As Hussein approached the scene of the ambush, he noticed black shapes moving on either side of the road just ahead and then saw bright flashes as the Israeli soldiers opened fire on his vehicle. The bullets punched holes through the windshield, showering Hussein with glass chips as he ducked down onto the passenger seat. The car’s momentum propelled the vehicle forward into the firefight as bullets shredded the chassis and tore into Hussein. One gave him a glancing blow to the skull, another hit an arm, another a shoulder. The car rolled off the road and stopped against an irrigation pipe. Still the Israelis blasted the car at almost point-blank range. Hussein saw the dashboard above his head explode into splinters of wood, plastic, and glass. The shooting stopped, and Hussein eased himself out of the passenger door onto the road.
“Get out of the car,” he whispered to Samira. He could hear her whimpering faintly and see she was not moving. There was nothing he could do for her. Hussein crawled into an overgrown ditch and hid.
The thud of helicopter rotor blades alerted the surviving Israeli commandos that help was at hand. Cobra helicopter gunships unleashed TOW antitank missiles into the orange trees and blasted the area with their 20 mm chain guns slung beneath the aircraft, creating a perimeter of fire to allow CH-53 rescue helicopters to land. Abu Shamran and his team, two of them slightly wounded, pulled back from the ambush site and slipped away unseen. Ahmad and his Amal comrades opened fire with their rifles and rocket-propelled grenades in the direction of the Israelis before pulling back themselves. It was twenty minutes since the first explosion had decimated the naval commandos.
Under the cover of fire from the Cobra helicopters, two CH-53 helicopters touched down in open fields. Reinforcements from the elite Sayeret Matkal unit and the Israeli Air Force’s aeromedical evacuation force dismounted from the CH-53 helicopters about a hundred yards from the ambush site and split into two groups. The commandos formed a defensive perimeter while the medics began ferrying survivors and bodies into the stationary helicopters.
The medics had a terrible task to perform. Some of the commandos had been blown to pieces, but the medics were obliged to observe Jewish custom and recover the entire remains of each individual. The rescuers were certain that two bodies were missing, but despite scouring the darkness with their night vision goggles, they could find no trace of them. What they failed to realize at the time was that the remains of one of the missing commandos were already on board a helicopter. The body parts of the other commando, Sergeant Ilya, whose explosives had been detonated by a bullet, were lying scattered over the battlefield. Hezbollah’s close-quarter machine gun fire had stopped, but the Israeli rescuers faced a new threat as mortar rounds began falling around them. The shelling claimed a final victim. A doctor from the rescuing force was killed when a mortar round exploded beside him. Nearby Lebanese army antiaircraft units blindly pumped rounds into the night sky, hoping to hit the helicopters and jets flying overhead. They also fired illumination shells to light up the ambush site. An F-16 jet fired a missile at an antiaircraft position. Israeli missile boats offshore fired a few rounds toward the village to silence the mortar fire. Several houses were damaged and two civilians wounded.
When news of the enormity of the disaster unfolding in south Lebanon reached the Israeli government, urgent contacts were made to the Americans to pass a message to Syria. Israel would respond with massive force if Hezbollah prevented the rescue mission from proceeding, the Israelis warned. The Americans contacted Damascus, and the message was then relayed to the Lebanese. Hezbollah pulled back, and Lebanese troops began moving into the area. One Amal fighter with an RPG on his shoulder who was running to join in the battle was seen being picked up by a hulking Lebanese army sergeant and thrown into the back of a jeep.
Shortly before dawn, more than four hours after the battle began, the last CH-53 lifted off and headed south.
Hussein Younis was still conscious as the Israelis departed. After hours of noise and commotion, the sudden silence was unnerving. He listened to the sound of the morning breeze blowing dust and garbage across the road. Ignoring the pain from his torn and bruised muscles, he inched toward the car and climbed inside. Samira was lying facedown on the backseat. It was obvious she was dead.
Hearing voices, Hussein looked through the shattered windshield to see two men walking toward the ambush site. He called out to them, but the men froze and turned away. He called to them again, and one of the men paused and spoke to his companion. Then they turned toward Hussein’s car. For the first time since he had driven his Mercedes into the middle of the firefight, Hussein Younis thought he might survive after all.
A row of pine trees beside the lane was on fire, the branches crackling with orange flames and thin tendrils of smoke spiraling into the pale blue dawn sky. The branches of trees lay smashed and torn on the ground covered in rubbish from a nearby garbage dump. Civilians and a few local Amal fighters clutching AK-47s and wearing T-shirts and jeans milled around the site, collecting trophies of the battle—weapons, ammunition, clothing, wet suits, helmets, and flippers abandoned by the Israelis. The Hezbollah fighters had departed the battleground long before, ensuring they were well away before the media arrived with their cameras. Lebanese soldiers cordoned off part of the scene to search for booby-trapped explosive devices left by the retreating Israelis. A UAV circling above caused some anxiety. Everyone remembered the Kfour incident a month earlier, when five Hezbollah men had been killed by bombs detonated by a drone after the Israeli assault force had departed.
On the edge of the orange orchard beside the dirt track where the Israeli commandos were ambushed, two small holes beside a metal water pipe marked the spot where the roadside bombs had exploded. Several flattened ball bearings were fused to the metal pipe by the heat of the explosion.
Mingled with the fragrant smell of burning pine wood was the reek of fresh blood. Scattered amid the debris were pieces of human flesh—a jawbone with a set of teeth, white blobs of brain matter. Someone had ripped a piece of cardboard from a box and used it as a tray for a gruesome collection of small body parts, including individual fingers, two fingers joined at the knuckle, an elbow, and several pieces of unidentifiable flesh. There were more body parts hanging from trees, including what was left of the head of Sergeant Ilya, the Israeli sapper whose explosives had been detonated by a bullet. In a gesture that captured the horror of the battle, a grinning Amal fighter lifted the shattered head by an ear and held it aloft in triumph.
“We Feel We Had a Leak”
The bungle
d naval commando raid on Ansariyah resulted in the death of twelve elite troops, including eleven of the sixteen-man Shayetet 13 team. It was the worst single-day casualty toll for the Israeli military in south Lebanon since 1985. To add to the blow, the disastrous raid came just hours after three Hamas suicide bombers blew themselves up in a crowded street in Jerusalem, killing seven civilians and wounding nearly a hundred others.
Netanyahu, himself a former Sayeret Matkal soldier, described the raid as “one of the worst tragedies that has ever occurred to us.” “We lost some of our best soldiers, and that’s not an exaggeration,” he said. “There have been several tragedies in the past, but I’ve never seen this type of tragedy.”
It was a staggering success for Hezbollah, yet many questions remained unanswered. What were the naval commandos doing in Ansariyah? Did Hezbollah have prior knowledge of the raid and set up the ambush?
In October, an Israeli commission of inquiry concluded that the naval commandos had fallen into a chance ambush by Lebanese guerrillas. The casualties were caused by two roadside bombs and the detonation of explosives carried by Sergeant Ilya. Most important, the investigation claimed there had been no breach of intelligence that could have forewarned Hezbollah. Not everyone was convinced, however. Two more army inquiries were held over the next eighteen months, as well as a separate investigation by the Israeli Knesset. All produced inconclusive results. “We feel we had a leak, but we can’t prove it,” Major General Moshe Kaplinsky admitted to me a decade later.
While the Israelis pondered what had gone wrong, Hezbollah quickly offered an explanation. Nasrallah told reporters later on the day of the ambush that the Islamic Resistance had tightened its defenses and nighttime haras units around southern villages to prevent any repetitions of the Kfour raid. His explanation dovetailed with the subsequent findings of the first Israeli inquiry.
Yet rumors persisted that Hezbollah had concocted an elaborate trap for the Israeli commandos, perhaps by turning a spy and giving him information to deliver to his Israeli handlers about a meeting of top Islamic Resistance commanders, with names and dates, in Ansariyah. Although Hezbollah refused to address such speculation, as the years passed, it began offering a different version of events.
In September 1998, on the first anniversary of the ambush, Nasrallah admitted on Lebanese television that Hezbollah had had foreknowledge of the Israeli raid, setting in motion a tantalizing psychological campaign that would keep everyone guessing for another twelve years.
“All I can say now is that we knew beforehand that there was going to be an operation,” he said. “Now the question is: If the resistance knew, who told them? But we can’t disclose that, because that won’t be in the Resistance’s best interest.”3
The truth was finally revealed by Nasrallah in August 2010 during a lengthy press conference. It turned out that Hezbollah had discovered in the mid-1990s how to intercept Israeli UAV video transmissions. The video footage captured by Israeli drones was unencrypted at the time, which allowed Hezbollah technicians to download the intercepted data and watch it on television screens.
Nasrallah said that they noticed the Israelis were showing an unusual amount of interest in Ansariyah, particularly the northern entrance of the village. Hezbollah surmised that the Israelis were planning another Kfour-style operation, and set up an ambush.
Yet it still remains unclear what the Israelis were doing in Ansariyah. Nasrallah admitted in his press conference that the purpose of the mission was still a mystery to Hezbollah.
Local residents claimed that a senior Hezbollah official used to spend some nights in the village. Could the Israelis have intended to kidnap or kill him? That possibility was lent some support by Amiram Levine, the former head of the IDF’s Northern Command, who told me that the intended target was a Hezbollah military commander.
There may yet be more to the Ansariyah story that Hezbollah prefers to keep under wraps. But Hezbollah’s official view is that the Israelis had no particular target in mind, contrary to speculation at the time. Instead, the Israeli assault fell within the prevailing policy of deep-penetration commando raids, similar to the one at Kfour, to kill resistance fighters and to signal to Hezbollah’s leadership that Israel could operate where it pleased.
“The Israelis were trying to spread panic in the souls of the resistance fighters,” Sheikh Naim Qassem told me in July 2009. “The number of killed Hezbollah fighters and their individual status within the organization was not as important as the fact that the Israelis could say they had infiltrated into the depths of the resistance.
“They had a plan to do [IED] set-up operations in several places,” Qassem added. “After Ansariyah, the whole project just collapsed.”
“How Can One Man Have Five Legs?”
Not only was the Ansariyah ambush a military success, but Hezbollah also reaped a propaganda coup over Israel’s mix-up of body parts belonging to the slain naval commandos.
In July 1998, after months of negotiations brokered by a German intelligence officer, a deal was concluded in which Ilya’s remains were exchanged for the bodies of forty resistance fighters and sixty Lebanese detainees. Among the freed prisoners was Ramzi Nohra. The wily double agent returned to Ibl es-Saqi for a few days before being dragged from his home by SLA intelligence agents and expelled from the occupation zone.
Sergeant Ilya’s remains were conveyed to Israel via the International Committee for the Red Cross, and here the story could have ended. But Hezbollah had another trick up its sleeve.
Questions were posed on its website, addressed to the Israeli public. The first queried the findings of the two Israeli inquiries into the Ansariyah debacle. Hezbollah’s teasing questions about how the group could have known the commandos were coming led to public pressure on the Israeli government to convene a third commission of inquiry. Then Hezbollah raised questions about the body parts it had returned to Israel. Hezbollah had always said that the remains included body parts from two soldiers apart from Ilya, adding that they had DNA evidence. But the Israeli authorities had kept that gruesome fact quiet, creating the impression to the Israeli public and the grieving relatives of the dead commandos that the only missing soldier from Ansariyah was Ilya and that the other eleven soldiers had been buried intact.
Hezbollah then posted on the website grisly photographs of the body parts, which included five feet. “How can one man have five legs?” taunted the caption. “Your army is concealing the facts. They not only disrespect your sons when they are alive by sending them to certain death, they also disrespect them after they are dead. The bodies of your sons are incomplete and mixed up with pieces of others.”
The propaganda ploy sparked an uproar in Israel, as a deeply embarrassed IDF was forced to admit that it had opened up the graves of two soldiers killed at Ansariyah to add the new body parts recovered in the swap.
Suddenly, families of the dead soldiers were demanding autopsies and DNA tests to check that the remains in the graves were really their relatives and not a mishmash of different bodies.
The Ansariyah episode encapsulated Hezbollah’s increasingly multidimensional and skillful approach to the conflict with Israel. Through a combination of resourceful intelligence work, battlefield prowess, and deft propaganda, Hezbollah had produced a highly effective result that forced Israel to readjust its tactics once more. Although Israel continued to employ special forces units inside the zone and along its edges until its troop withdrawal in 2000, the Ansariyah raid was the last deep-penetration operation into Lebanon.
Ending “the Myth of the Merkava”
The fall of 1997 was a miserable period for the Israelis in south Lebanon. Even apparent achievements fell flat. On September 12, exactly one week after Ansariyah, Hadi Nasrallah, the eighteen-year-old eldest son of the Hezbollah leader, was killed along with two comrades in a clash with an Egoz unit on the edge of the zone. His corpse was recovered from the field and brought to Israeli headquarters in Marjayoun, where local reporters film
ed it lying in a corridor as grinning SLA militiamen stood by.
But the outpouring of public sympathy in Lebanon for Nasrallah boosted his credibility even further. Rafik Hariri, who had also lost a son, was deeply moved by Hadi Nasrallah’s death. “Rafik Hariri used to tell me that all the political leaders in Lebanon usually provide their kids nice cars, send them to the best universities, and prepare them to inherit their political roles. And only Hassan Nasrallah sends his son to be a martyr. He said he had never met anyone like that before. ‘Nasrallah is a man I can trust,’ he used to say,” recalls Mustafa Nasr, Hariri’s interlocutor with Hezbollah.
Nasrallah refused to accept condolences, instead telling supporters to congratulate him on Hadi’s “martyrdom.” At a ceremony a week later, Nasrallah announced that Hezbollah was forming a new resistance unit, the Saraya Muqawama al-Lubnaniyya, or Lebanese Resistance Brigades, open to all volunteers regardless of religion. The unit was a response to the number of Lebanese clamoring to join the resistance, Nasrallah said. The new recruits would be trained and guided by regular Hezbollah cadres, he added, after which they would carry out operations against the Israelis in the south. Phone numbers were printed in Lebanese newspapers that hopeful recruits could call for instructions on how to join.
To demonstrate that it remained unbowed by Hadi Nasrallah’s death, Hezbollah upped the tempo in the following week. On September 14, a pair of Israeli soldiers were killed by a large roadside bomb, and four days later, Hezbollah launched a simultaneous multipronged dawn attack against twenty-five Israeli and SLA outposts stretching the length of the occupation zone. The assault, involving almost two hundred fighters, began at 7:00 A.M. precisely when Hezbollah mortar and rocket batteries opened fire toward Israeli and SLA positions stretching from the Mediterranean to the hills west of Mount Hermon. As the fighting raged along the front line, a fighter squinted through the rubber-lined optic sight of an AT-4 Spigot antitank missile, an improved version of the AT-3 Sagger, and took careful aim at the rectangular lines of a Merkava Mark 2 tank nestled near an Israeli outpost in Rihan village. On firing, the missile streaked toward its target while the operator kept the sight aimed steadily at the side of the tank. The wire-guided missile slammed into the side of the Merkava, the shaped-charge warhead burning through the armor plating and spraying its molten copper plasma jet inside, killing the tank’s commander.
Warriors of God Page 23