The compound included four buildings, in addition to the four-story office building that housed Colonel Jibril Rajoub[11] and other security officials. The entire facility had been designed, built, and equipped by the CIA. The police were trained and armed by the CIA. The CIA even had offices there. Hundreds of heavily armed police were inside, along with a large number of prisoners, including Bilal Barghouti and others on Israel’s hit list. The Shin Bet and IDF were in a no-nonsense mood. Loudspeakers announced that the army would blow up Building One in five minutes and ordered everybody out.
Exactly five minutes later, boom! Building Two. “Everybody out!” Boom! Building Three. Boom! Building Four. Boom!
“Take off your clothes!” came the demand over the loudspeakers. The Israelis took no chances that someone might still be armed or packed with explosives. Hundreds of men stripped naked. They were given jumpsuits, loaded onto buses, and taken to nearby Ofer Military Base—where the Shin Bet discovered its mistake.
Of course there were too many people to lock up, but the Israelis wanted only the fugitives anyway. They had planned to sift through the detainees and release all but those on its list of suspects. The problem was that everybody had left their clothes—with their ID cards—back at the compound. How would the security forces distinguish between wanted men and police?
Ofer Dekel, Loai’s boss’s boss, was in charge. He called Jibril Rajoub, who had been away from the compound at the time of the attack. Dekel gave Rajoub a special permit so he could pass safely through hundreds of tanks and thousands of soldiers. When he arrived, Dekel asked Rajoub if he would mind pointing out which men worked for him and which were fugitives. Rajoub said he would be happy to. Quickly, Rajoub identified police as fugitives and fugitives as police, and the Shin Bet released all the wanted men.
“Why did you do that to me?” Dekel asked, after he figured out what had happened.
“You just blew up my offices and my compound,” Rajoub calmly explained in what amounted to a Palestinian version of “Duh.” Dekel also seemed to have forgotten that his PA pal had been wounded a year earlier when IDF tanks and helicopters leveled his home, making him even less inclined to do favors for the Israelis.
The Shin Bet was deeply embarrassed. The only thing they could do in retaliation was release an official account that branded Rajoub as a traitor for turning over the wanted men to Israel in a deal brokered by the CIA. As a result, Rajoub lost his power and ended up as head of the Palestinian Soccer Association.
This was clearly a debacle.
Over the next three weeks, the Israelis did lift the curfew from time to time, and during a break on April 15, I was able to bring some food and other necessities to my father. He told me he didn’t feel safe in that house and wanted to move. I called one of the Hamas leaders and asked if he knew of any place where Hassan Yousef could be protected. He told me to take my father to the location where Sheikh Jamal al-Taweel, another high-profile Hamas fugitive, was hiding.
Wow, I thought. The arrest of Jamal al-Taweel would certainly make the Shin Bet feel much better about Operation Defensive Shield. I thanked him but said, “Let’s not put my father in the same place. It might be too dangerous for both of them to be there together.” We agreed on another spot, and I quickly got my father settled in his new safe house. Then I called Loai.
“I know where Jamal al-Taweel is hiding.”
Loai couldn’t believe the news; al-Taweel was arrested that very night.
That same day, we also nabbed another of the IDF’s most wanted men—Marwan Barghouti.
Though Marwan was one of Hamas’s most elusive leaders, his capture actually turned out to be quite simple. I called one of his guards and talked with him briefly on his cell phone while the Shin Bet traced the call. Barghouti was later tried in a civilian court and sentenced to five consecutive life sentences.
Meanwhile, not a day passed when Operation Defensive Shield did not make international headlines. Few were flattering. Out of Jenin came rumors of a large-scale massacre, which no one could verify because the IDF had sealed the city. Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erekat said 500 were dead. The figure was later revised to about 50.
In Bethlehem, more than 200 Palestinians were under siege in the Church of the Nativity for about five weeks. After the dust had settled and most of the civilians had been allowed to leave, 8 Palestinians had been killed, 26 were sent to Gaza, 85 were checked by the IDF and released, and the 13 most wanted were exiled to Europe.
All told during Defensive Shield, nearly 500 Palestinians were killed, 1,500 were wounded, and nearly 4,300 were detained by the IDF. On the other side, 29 Israelis were dead, and 127 were wounded. The World Bank estimated the damage at more than $360 million.
Chapter Twenty-Three
SUPERNATURAL PROTECTION
Summer 2002
Wednesday, July 31, 2002, was a scorcher. One hundred and two degrees Fahrenheit. On the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University, no classes were in session, though some students were still taking exams. Others lined up to register for fall classes. At 1:30 p.m., the university’s Frank Sinatra Cafeteria was packed with people cooling off, enjoying iced drinks, and chatting. Nobody noticed the bag that had been left there by a contract painter.
The massive explosion gutted the cafeteria and left nine people dead, including five Americans. Eighty-five others were injured, fourteen seriously.
That same day, my good friend Saleh disappeared. When we checked the locations of the other four on our most-wanted list, we found that they, too, had disappeared without a trace, even severing all connection with their families. We were able to identify the Hamas cell that planted the bomb and found that its members were from inside Israel, not the occupied territories. They carried blue Israeli ID cards that allowed them to go anywhere they wanted. Five were from East Jerusalem: married, nice families, good jobs.
During the course of the investigation, one name came to the surface: Mohammed Arman, a man who lived in one of the Ramallah villages. Under torture, Arman was asked to identify the man behind the Hebrew University attack. He said he knew him only by the name “Sheikh.”
The interrogators brought in photographs of suspected terrorists, like a book of mug shots in an American police station, and told him to point to “Sheikh.” Arman identified a picture of Ibrahim Hamed, providing us with the first hard evidence of his involvement with suicide bombings.
We would learn later that, once identified, Hamed used his exposure to protect Saleh and the other members of his cell. All the cells under his command had been told that if they were captured, they were to blame everything on Hamed, since he no longer had anything to lose. So for the time being, the trail ended with Ibrahim Hamed. And he was nowhere to be found.
During the months following Operation Defensive Shield, Ramallah was under curfew. Arafat’s operations were pretty much shut down. USAID had suspended its projects and was not allowing its employees to enter the West Bank. Israeli checkpoints strangled the city, letting nothing but ambulances in or out. And I was officially a fugitive. All of this made it very difficult for me to get around. Nevertheless, I still had to meet with the Shin Bet every other week or so to discuss ongoing operations that could not be discussed on the telephone.
Equally important, I needed emotional support. The loneliness was terrible. I had become a stranger in my own city. I couldn’t share my life with anybody, not even my own family. And I couldn’t trust anyone else. Ordinarily, Loai and I met at one of the Shin Bet safe houses in Jerusalem. But I could no longer get out of Ramallah. It wasn’t even safe for me to be seen on the streets in the daytime. None of the usual options were possible.
11
An interesting sidenote about Colonel Jibril Rajoub: “This man had taken advantage of his position as protective security chief in the West Bank to build his own little kingdom, making his officers bow and scrape as though he was heir to a throne. I have seen his breakfast table groan under the weight of fifty different dishes, prepared just to show everyone how important he was. I have also seen that Rajoub was rude and careless and that he behaved more like a gangster than a leader. When Arafat rounded up as many Hamas leaders and members as he could back in 1995, Rajoub tortured them without mercy. Several times, Hamas had threatened to assassinate him, prompting him to buy a bulletproof, explosion-proof car. Even Arafat didn’t have anything like it.”