Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  While some IDF commanders supported leaving Lebanon, others had difficulty hiding their bitterness toward those lobbying for a troop withdrawal, deducing that Israeli society had gone dangerously soft if it could no longer tolerate the deaths of soldiers defending the state. In early 2000, Colonel Shmuel Zakai, the commander of the Golani Brigade, referred to the “Four Mothers” as the “four worthless rags.” He made the remark to a group of soldiers who were about to deploy into south Lebanon. Unfortunately for Zakai, the mothers of some of the soldiers were members of the Four Mothers, and his comment made it into the press, earning the colonel a rebuke from his superiors.

  The “Unlikely” Seven Villages

  The Lebanese government recognized that it played a secondary role to the Syrian-Israeli track in the pre-negotiations phase. Once Syria’s demands were satisfied, then Damascus would allow Lebanon to press its own case in talks with Israel. So low was Lebanon’s importance that even when President Clinton announced on December 8 that peace talks would begin the following week with a preliminary meeting in Washington between Ehud Barak and Syrian foreign minister Farouq al-Sharaa, Beirut was left in the dark.

  “The prime minister saw the announcement on CNN like everyone else, and now he’s gone to bed,” an aide to Salim Hoss told me when I telephoned the prime minister’s home for a reaction. Amid all the smiles, back-slapping, and congratulatory rhetoric, nobody, apparently, had thought to let the Lebanese know prior to the formal announcement that the Israeli-Syrian peace track had been revived.

  A week earlier, Lebanon had presented its list of seven demands that would have to be met before peace could be agreed with Israel. Among them was the return of all Lebanese territory annexed by Israel, including the Seven Villages and the Shebaa Farms. The “Seven Villages” referred to a handful of villages populated by Shias that had ended up inside Palestine when the Lebanon-Palestine boundary was formally ratified in 1924, even though the residents had been handed Lebanese citizenship four years earlier. The Shias of the Seven Villages became Palestinian citizens and were expelled or fled their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, joining the Palestinian refugees streaming into Lebanon.

  Lebanon’s demand for the Seven Villages was clearly unacceptable to Israel, and it was hard to imagine that the Lebanese were serious about the claim. After all, it would effectively entail nonrecognition of the border between Lebanon and Israel, paving the way for the Jewish state to claim its own amendments to a frontier with which it had never been satisfied. If the path of the border was open to dispute, then UN Resolution 425—which called for an Israeli troop withdrawal to Lebanon’s internationally recognized boundaries—would become meaningless.

  Shortly after the Lebanese government issued its seven-point list, I contacted Salim Hoss to question him on the inconsistencies of the Seven Villages demand.

  Hoss was a veteran politician and three-time former prime minister whose lugubrious composure and reputation for honesty stood at odds with some of his more flamboyant and less scrupulous colleagues. Yes, he agreed, “The villages were never part of Lebanon as they were incorporated into Palestine.” Pressed further, Hoss said it was “unlikely” that the demand would remain on the list.

  The Daily Star ran Hoss’s comments on the front page of the next day’s edition. That evening, on returning to the Daily Star office from south Lebanon, I was told by a flustered receptionist that Hoss had been trying to reach me all day. When I called the prime minister, he said in a tired voice that while the Seven Villages were not covered by Resolution 425, the claim was not being dropped from the government’s list of demands after all, and would we please print a statement in The Daily Star to that effect. Someone whose ear was close to Syria, it seemed, had taken exception to the prime minister’s unilateral amendment of the seven-point list and had advised him to retract.

  Hezbollah reacted to the resumption of Israeli-Syrian peace talks by launching a simultaneous attack against twenty Israeli and SLA outposts. The coordinated assault, which included a Special Forces team storming the Sojod compound in the northern sector, came just hours ahead of the Barak-Sharaa meeting in Washington. Days later, a Hezbollah car bomber blew himself up beside a convoy of Israeli army vehicles in Marjayoun, the first such attack in nearly four years, although only one soldier was slightly wounded.

  Nonetheless, it was evident that Hezbollah was facing difficulties in the south. The IED ambushes were not meeting with the same level of success as in the past, partly because there were relatively few targets available—Israeli troops were barely seen anymore, spending all their time in reinforced concrete bunkers. Barak had pledged to have the soldiers back home by July, and no one wanted to be the last to die in the dust of south Lebanon.

  “We didn’t like the announcement of a withdrawal,” recalls Brigadier General Moshe Kaplinsky, then the head of the Israeli army’s Galilee Division. “It put us as commanders in the field in a troubling situation. How could we convince troops in the field to fight when they knew they were going home?”

  On the other hand, no Israeli soldiers had been killed in south Lebanon since August, but Hezbollah fatalities had spiked in the last two months of 1999. In November, an attack on the Sojod compound to plant a flag on the ramparts had cost the lives of seven Hezbollah men, the highest single fatality toll for the party since the mid-1980s.

  On January 19, Major General Shaul Mofaz, the IDF chief of staff, held an upbeat news conference during which he announced that 1999 had been a comparatively good year, with only thirteen soldiers killed in south Lebanon, half the toll for 1998.

  Hezbollah replied in a statement that the lower casualties were due to resistance operations having led to a reduction in the number of troops in the zone. Furthermore, Hezbollah added, the soldiers who remained in the zone “are in fact paralyzed and captive in their fortified positions.”

  As of January 20, the day after Mofaz’s news conference, Hezbollah significantly stepped up operations, launching fifteen or more attacks a day, detonating roadside bombs, and battering Israeli and SLA outposts with large quantities of AT-3 Sagger antitank missiles, mortar rounds, and shells from an old towed 122 mm artillery cannon, one of two it had acquired a year earlier.

  The fresh offensive came days after the first major round of peace talks between the Israelis and Syrians at Shepherdstown, Virginia, had come to an inconclusive end. Farouq al-Sharaa had surprised the American mediators by showing behind closed doors an uncharacteristic flexibility and an evident desire to push the talks forward, despite maintaining a hostile stance in public. Barak, however, failed to reciprocate. To the anger of the Syrians and the irritation of the Americans, Barak hedged, fearful of weakening his political position back home by being seen as too eager to grant concessions to the Syrians. The Syrian delegation returned home assuming that Barak was not serious about peace.

  Now the Israelis were going to pay the price in south Lebanon.

  The Chink in Israel’s Armor

  The brilliant sunshine on the morning of Sunday, January 30, failed to warm the chilly air in the rocky hills around the Christian village of Dibil in the zone’s western sector. Aql Hashem, the stocky, self-confident SLA commander of the zone’s western sector, drove to a small farmhouse he owned about half a mile outside the village to prepare a barbecue for a group of farmers whom he had invited to discuss the season’s tobacco harvest. Hashem was a tough militia veteran, respected by his men and highly regarded by the Israelis, who saw him as a potential future commander of the SLA.

  When Hashem arrived at the farm, he found his son waiting for him. They chatted for a few minutes, unaware that they were being watched and filmed by Hezbollah Special Forces operatives hidden on a small hillock just two hundred yards to the north.

  Hashem strode over to a log pile to gather fuel for the wood-burning stove in the farmhouse. As he bent down to pick up the logs, at least three IEDs exploded simultaneously beside him. Hashem died instantly.

  Hezboll
ah had been planning to kill Hashem for months, knowing that his death would deal a mortal blow to the militia. Hashem had been placed under close observation, his movements and habits carefully studied. The assassination plan was set in motion when Hezbollah was tipped off about Hashem’s scheduled meeting with the tobacco farmers. The Hezbollah hit team infiltrated the zone three days earlier, planting the bombs and then settling into a camouflaged observation post nearby.

  The dismay in Israel over Hashem’s death was palpable. “He was one of my best friends. We had many days and nights together all over the western [sector], hours of talking about everything,” recalls Colonel Noam Ben-Zvi, the IDF commander of Hashem’s area. “We knew that it would happen. We warned him that it would happen, and even warned him that it would happen at the place where he died. But he had a lot of confidence and after so many years became careless about his security.”

  But Hashem’s assassination was only the beginning. The following morning, a team from Hezbollah’s antitank unit fired a TOW missile toward the Ezziyah compound on a hill high above the Litani River where it squeezed through a narrow gorge. The position was rarely attacked and was regarded by the Israelis as one of the safest postings in the occupation zone. Its relative safety and proximity to the border—less than ten minutes’ drive from Metulla in northern Galilee—made it a popular viewing point for Israeli politicians visiting the zone. The TOW missile streaked across the six-hundred-foot Litani ravine and straight through the slit window of a concrete observation bunker. The blast from the missile killed three soldiers and wounded another four.

  Hezbollah had achieved a similar feat six days earlier, shooting an antitank missile through the viewing slit in another frontline IDF outpost, killing the first Israeli soldier since the previous August. With this second penetration of a fortified bunker, it was evident that Hezbollah had found a chink in the IDF’s protective armor.

  In response, Barak threatened to break off peace talks with Syria until Damascus reined in Hezbollah. The Israelis sought revenge by attempting to kill top resistance leader Ibrahim Aql in a bungled helicopter gunship attack. Barak was furious at Aql’s narrow escape, while Ephraim Sneh, the Israeli deputy defense minister, ruefully observed that the Hezbollah commander had a “gentile’s luck.”

  “The Lebanese Valley of the Dead”

  Two days later, on February 6, a Hezbollah Special Forces unit ambushed an Israeli patrol six hundred yards from the border, on a track near the prominent Jabal Blat outpost in the western sector. A bomb-sniffing dog accompanying the patrol detected the IED just before it detonated. The dog disappeared in the blast, but the last-second warning ensured that only three soldiers were wounded. As the casualties were being treated on the spot, the Hezbollah fighters observing from nearby directed accurate mortar and rocket fire onto the patrol. One soldier was killed and another four wounded as rockets and mortar rounds fell among them. The intense fire prevented helicopters from touching down to evacuate the casualties, forcing medics to treat them on the main road beside the border with Israel. At that moment, cameramen from two Israeli television channels arrived and filmed through the border fence the screaming, blood-soaked soldiers being treated just a few yards away. The grim reality of the south Lebanon quagmire was broadcast into Israeli homes that night to a stunned audience. It was the first time that the Israeli public had been presented with such shocking and graphic footage of the war in Lebanon.

  PICTURES FROM HELL, ran a banner headline in Israel’s Maariv newspaper the next morning. “The Lebanese valley of the dead penetrated the living room of Mr. Israel after 18 years of avoidance.”

  Barak was caught in a dilemma. He knew that a heavy retaliation to the spate of military fatalities in south Lebanon could jeopardize prospects of further talks with Syria. But the upsetting television images of the wounded soldiers and the inability to stop Hezbollah’s deadly missile attacks could not be ignored. With his top military commanders screaming for action, Barak gave the order for air strikes against Lebanese infrastructure targets. That night, three electricity plants were bombed, including the Jamhour electricity switching station in the hills above Beirut, the third time the facility had been blown up in four years. Seventeen civilians were wounded in the air raids.

  In south Lebanon, the Katyusha rockets were on the launchers hidden in wadis and olive groves and the Hezbollah operators were waiting for the order to fire. But the order never came. Hezbollah stayed its hand, choosing instead to respond in the most appropriate manner possible.

  At 2:50 P.M. the next day, thirteen hours after the Israeli jets finished smashing the electricity plants, a Hezbollah antitank squad shot yet another TOW missile into an Israeli outpost, killing one more soldier.

  Israel had expected Hezbollah to retaliate with a Katyusha barrage on Galilee and was prepared to counterrespond with an even more damaging bombing campaign against Lebanese infrastructure. But Hezbollah did not take the bait. How much influence Syria had in the decision to refrain from launching rockets is unclear, but either way it was a smart move. The mere threat to retaliate with Katyushas was sufficient to achieve paralysis in northern Israel. Barak ordered a 48-hour state of emergency in the north, forcing some three hundred thousand people to flee or sit in bomb shelters. Around 80 percent of the population of Kiryat Shemona abandoned the town. Economic losses ran at $2.4 million per day. All that without a single Katyusha rocket crossing the border.

  Israeli officials accused Hezbollah of breaching the April Understanding by firing its TOW missiles from populated areas. But that was untrue. Hezbollah had fired from open areas and aimed at military targets. It was Israel that had broken the rules by attacking Lebanese infrastructure. Now, with this latest death of a soldier in south Lebanon, Barak knew he could not justify a second night of air strikes against civilian targets in Lebanon. He had exhausted his political capital with the first round of raids.

  On February 11, the delegates to the Monitoring Group arrived in Naqoura to address a flurry of protests filed by both sides. But the session was in trouble from the start. The Israeli delegation refused to leave its room despite coaxing by the American and French representatives. Then, an hour and a half after the meeting was supposed to start, Hezbollah struck again. This time the target of the antitank missile was an observation turret on the ramparts of Beaufort Castle. Another Israeli soldier was killed—the seventh in three weeks. When the news of the latest fatality reached Naqoura, the Israeli delegation stormed out. It was the last time the Monitoring Group convened.

  In the days that followed, the Israeli government sanctioned the creation of a three-man committee empowered to order immediate raids into Lebanon without having to seek prior cabinet approval. David Levy, the hawkish foreign minister, delivered a series of bloodcurdling threats redolent of the Old Testament in which he warned that if Hezbollah rocketed northern Israel, Lebanon would pay “soul for soul, blood for blood, child for child.” On the ground, the IDF belatedly began erecting steel mesh antimissile fences around its outposts to protect the vulnerable observation bunkers.

  Hezbollah’s propaganda machine took full advantage of the escalation, with Al-Manar broadcasting a clip showing portraits of each of the seven dead soldiers, one after the other. The clip ended with a blank box containing a question mark and a message in Hebrew asking who would be the next victim.

  Hezbollah had scored more impressive single achievements, such as the Ansariyah ambush and General Gerstein’s assassination, and it was the sustained and deadly IED campaign that sapped Israel’s resolve to stay in Lebanon; but the three-week escalation in January and February 2000 was perhaps the pinnacle of Hezbollah’s resistance campaign against the Israeli occupation. It blended thoughtful intelligence work to discover the weak spots in the Israeli outposts; skillful battlefield exploitation of the TOW missiles; and tactical foresight by playing within the rules of the April Understanding.

  In three short weeks, Hezbollah had turned the tables on Mofaz’s confi
dent declaration that the Israeli army had gained the upper hand in south Lebanon. The spate of military casualties and the television footage of wounded soldiers deepened Israeli public opposition to the occupation in Lebanon. In March, a Gallup poll for Maariv newspaper found that 61 percent of respondents wanted an immediate withdrawal from Lebanon, even without an agreement with Lebanon and Syria.

  “This is one war we have lost,” opined Yoel Marcus in Haaretz. “If we are fated to leave anyway—let’s do it now.”

  Failure in Geneva

  On March 5, the Israeli government announced that it would pull the troops out of Lebanon by July 2000, hopefully within the framework of an agreement. If no agreement was forthcoming, “the government will convene at an appropriate time to discuss the method of implementation of the above-mentioned decision,” promised the Israeli cabinet communiqué.

  There was no going back now; the countdown to withdrawal had begun.

  The Israeli army drew up two plans of withdrawal. The first, dubbed “New Horizon,” envisioned a pullback to the international border in conformity with Resolution 425. The second, “Morning Twilight,” was an option in the event of a unilateral withdrawal. The one significant difference was that Morning Twilight envisaged a redeployment to the Purple Line, Israel’s military border where the fence had been pushed deeper into Lebanon in certain places over the years to seize the high ground. This plan would leave under Israeli control eight outposts either straddling the border or fully inside Lebanese territory on the annexed pockets of land. The Israeli army assessed that if a withdrawal was conducted without an agreement with Syria, Hezbollah would continue to launch attacks against Israel. Therefore, if fighting was unavoidable, Israel might as well retain the tactical advantages offered by the Purple Line deployment.