Clan Warfare
The village of Silat al-Harithiya was a landmark for two types of people—those who were part of the global jihad and those who were fighting it. Everyone else stayed clear away from the hilltop home to slightly under ten thousand inhabitants.
During the British Mandate of Palestine, His Majesty’s forces referred to the village as Bandit Country. When the Palestinian village became a West Bank border outpost along the 1949 Armistice Lines, following the establishment of the Jewish State, the Jordanian police and military forces that controlled the area thought it more prudent to ignore the goings-on inside Silat al-Harithiya rather than make the attempt to impose law and order. Israeli forces that assumed control of the West Bank following the 1967 war considered Silat al-Harithiya to be a thorn; the landscape was owned by the hardcore nationalist groups. When Silat al-Harithiya became the northwesternmost reach of Area A, fully administered by the Palestinian Authority, even Arafat’s security services rarely ventured into the village; it was too dangerous. Some of the best car thieves in the West Bank called Silat al-Harithiya home. Everything from stolen weapons to smuggled cattle passed through the village gates, along with the interconnected bands of brothers and cousins that controlled the black market illicit trade. Even by West Bank standards Silat al-Harithiya was pure outlaw.
Silat al-Harithiya was strategically situated as a bastion for brigands—one could walk from the village to Jenin, as well as to Megiddo Junction inside the pre-1967 boundaries of the State of Israel. Silat al-Harithiya was a stone’s throw to the Israeli-Arab city of Umm el-Fahm, the “Mother of Charcoal,” that straddled the ultra-important Route 65 artery that connected much of northern Israel along the Mediterranean coast with the Jezreel Valley and points north and south.
Silat al-Harithiya’s favorite son was Abdullah Yusef Azzam—the man who created Osama bin Laden. Born in 1941, Azzam was a legendary religious scholar who was trained in Damascus and who taught in a Silat al-Harithiya mosque up until June 1967, when he and his family fled to Jordan after the Six Day War. Targeted by Jordanian intelligence because of his radical views, Azzam fled to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where he joined the faculty at King Abdul Azziz University in Jeddah; Azzam was a professor during the years that Osama bin Laden attended the university. In 1979 when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Azzam issued a fatwa declaring resistance to the invasion of Muslim lands as an act of faith; both the Afghan and Palestinian struggles, he argued, were holy wars and a personal obligation of all Muslims. He moved to Peshawar, Pakistan, and ultimately founded the Services Office to accommodate Arabs flocking to fight the Soviets, providing them with guest houses and training camps. Azzam traveled around the Middle East and even to the United States to raise funds for his Afghan Arabs. Osama bin Laden became one of Azzam’s main benefactors and coordinators; some would say the two men became bitter rivals over the course of a global jihad. Azzam was assassinated in Pakistan on November 24, 1989, by unknown killers. His impact on the global jihadist movement was far-reaching. Azzam’s famous phrase of “Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences, and no dialogues” was spray-painted everywhere in Silat al-Harithiya.
Silat al-Harithiya’s favorite family was the Jaradat clan. According to estimates, Israeli and Palestinian, the Jaradat family is one of the largest Hamulots, Arabic slang for “clans,” in the West Bank. They are certainly the most dominant extended family in the Jenin area, with more than 5,500 family members spread out on both sides of the border. The 1948 War of Israeli Independence split the family in two, with relatives spread out around the northern West Bank on the Palestinian side and Wadi Ara on the Israeli side.1 The Hamula meant everything in the Arab world. The ties to one’s extended clan were unbreakable, and they could not be shattered by religion and certainly not nationality. Blood wasn’t just thicker than water—it was brewed from impenetrable molten steel. And, even though the extended Jaradat clan was incredibly well represented in the ranks of the various Palestinian terrorist factions, they were always Jaradats first and foremost.
There were some two hundred Jaradat family members in Israeli prisons for security crimes.2 Some were low-level operatives and triggermen. Others had been elevated to the role of suicide bomber. Others were senior leaders.
On April 10, 2002, Rajab Ahmed Jaradat blew himself up on board the 960 bus en route from Haifa to Jerusalem as it traveled along the eastern slopes of Mount Carmel. Eight people were killed in the bombing; twenty-two were critically wounded. Jaradat carried out the bombing at the behest of Hamas. There were Jaradats who served Arafat’s Fatah. One member of the clan, Ali Jaradat, was a high-ranking operations officer in the PFLP; he even served as its unofficial spokesman. Mostly though, the Jaradats were at the tip of the spear of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad networks in and around Jenin. The PIJ Jaradats, as they were known in Shin Bet circles, were considered to be the most capable terrorists in the entire West Bank. These Jaradats—brothers, nephews, cousins, and in-laws—commanded cells and were responsible for most of the major terrorist attacks perpetrated in northern Israel since the onset of the intifada. Shin Bet agents had no difficulty in alphabetizing their West Bank fugitive files for the West Bank. As one Ya’mas operator said frustratingly, “So many of the Shin Bet’s most wanted surnames were Jaradat this or Jaradat that. There was always a Jaradat involved.”3
The Jaradat clan’s code of loyalty was bulletproof, as was the compartmentalized secrecy of the PIJ. The PIJ’s core membership was inbred—everyone was related to someone else in the organization. Blood recruited other blood. The area clans provided the PIJ with a very effective veil of armor against attempted infiltration by Israel’s security services. Clans like the Jaradats could not be bribed or bullied into cooperating with the Shin Bet: bribes were ineffective because the Iranians, through the MOIS (Ministry of Intelligence and Security) and Hezbollah, had invested so much money in Silat al-Harithiya that the small village was called “Little Tehran” and the Israeli intelligence services could never compete with the cash that flowed from Iran. But the cash was irrelevant to loyalty. No pressure, physical or psychological, would get a member of the clan to betray another. In this insular world, one was a member of a clan before one was a Muslim or a Palestinian. This airtight loyalty and obstinate defiance enabled the Jaradats to rise quickly up the chain of command of the PIJ’s al-Quds, or Jerusalem, Brigade—the military wing of the organization.
Anas Jaradat was one of PIJ’s master bomb builders—an engineer—and one of its most promising commanders. Engineers were always the most important specialists in the Palestinian groups; there was never a shortage of men—and women—who were willing to sacrifice their lives and become shaheeds, or martyrs, but they were all harmless unless someone could provide them with an explosive package that was economical yet powerful, reliable yet idiot-proof. Anas had been a prized pupil and protégé of Iyad Sawalhah, the legendary PIJ bomb builder who had topped the Shin Bet’s most-wanted list for years; engineers were always a target of the Shin Bet. Sawalhah, all of twenty-eight years old, had spent the last fifteen years fighting the Israelis or being incarcerated by them. He fought in the first intifada as a member of the Black Panthers, where his trademark skill was that of an executioner; he personally killed dozens of Palestinians suspected of collaborating with the Shin Bet. The Shin Bet arrested him and he served nearly a decade in an Israeli prison. He found religion behind bars, and when in 1998 he was freed as part of a larger amnesty, he joined the PIJ and allowed his prison pedigree to propel him up the chain of command of the West Bank’s network of cells and operatives. He was a powerful role model to a man like Anas Jaradat.
Both Anas Jaradat and Sawalhah were behind some of the most lethal suicide bombings of the al-Aqsa intifada—before, during, and after Operation Defensive Shield. Both men were responsible for nearly one hundred dead—their specialty was the bombing of buses that traversed the roadways of northern Israel, just across the Green Line from Jenin. On March 20, 2002, seven people were killed and thirty wounded when a bomber blew himself up on the No. 823 bus traveling from Tel Aviv to Nazareth; the bomber had boarded the bus on Route 65, near an Israeli-Arab town, a stone’s throw from Jenin. Anas Jaradat’s bomb, handed to a distant cousin, destroyed the No. 960 bus on April 10, 2002, killing eight and wounding twenty-two. On June 5, 2002, seventeen people were killed and thirty-eight people were wounded, when a car bomb, packed with more than one hundred kilograms of homemade explosives, was crashed into the No. 830 bus traveling from Tel Aviv to Tiberias at Megiddo Junction; the force of the explosion, and the fires caused by the blast, completely destroyed the bus. During the summer of 2002, there were a dozen foiled bombings along Route 65 and in the Wadi Ara area. The carnage could have been worse—some of the bombers were intercepted by aggressive Israeli police patrols.
On October 21, 2002, the No. 841 bus traveling from Kiryat Shmonah near the Lebanese border to Tel Aviv blew up shortly after making a stop to pick up a passenger on Route 65 near Karkur Junction, located just east of the town of Hadera, some twenty-one miles southeast of Haifa. A suicide bomber had driven into the back of the commuter bus a jeep that Jaradat and Sawalhah had fitted with more than fifty kilograms of explosives. The blast resulted in an inferno that engulfed the bus, as well as two vehicles that were nearby. The flames were so intense, so out of control, that first responders could not get close enough to try to rescue any possible survivors; the bus was also full of soldiers and police officers traveling north, and the inferno caused the ammunition they carried to detonate. Fourteen people were killed in the attack and fifty were wounded. One of those killed was Staff Sergeant Liat Ben-Ami, a twenty-one-year-old Border Guard policewoman who was only four months away from completing her mandatory conscripted service. “She had served in combat situations near Jenin,” a family friend would say at her funeral, “but now, she gets killed on her way home.”4
The Karkur Junction attack propelled Sawalhah and Jaradat to the top of the Shin Bet’s most-wanted list. The Shin Bet dedicated enormous resources to end the careers of these two ambitious men—especially after an attempt by the PIJ to detonate a massive suicide car bomb underneath the three Azrieli skyscrapers in Tel Aviv was thwarted by alert traffic policemen manning a roadblock. The Ya’mas had spent a good portion of their round-the-clock operational time focused on this tandem of bomb-building engineers. The unit had the files on both men during Yaakov Berman’s hunting forays, and the undercover operators had sat in mosques, residences, cafés, and even caves on tips that the Shin Bet received that the men had been located. There was never concrete intelligence about the location of either man, though, only indications. Every special operations unit in the Israeli order of battle acted on those tips in hunting the pair. But Sawalhah and Jaradat were not even ghosts; they were rumors of ghosts. The raids turned up nothing.
Sawalhah was located first. On the night of November 9, 2002, a Golani Brigade commando task force raided a safe house in the Kasbah of Jenin where intelligence reports believed Sawalhah was hiding. The reconnaissance commandos closed in around the house and ordered Sawalhah to come out and surrender. He sent his wife out to stall, while he hid inside a hollowed-out compartment prepared for him in the home’s kitchen. When Israeli forces demanded that he come out and surrender, he threw hand grenades at them and fired at them with automatic weapons. Sawalhah was determined to fight to the end: he kept the Golani force at bay for an hour before the commandos entered the location and ended the ordeal.
Anas Jaradat was now the PIJ commander in Jenin. It was now his turn to be the West Bank’s most wanted.
The Shin Bet dedicated enormous resources—and countless man hours—to locating Anas Jaradat. Shin Bet case agents summoned the elite of Israel’s special operations arsenal on raids that yielded few results. For six months the Ya’mas acted on tips from the Shin Bet—each squadron and each team was deployed on terrain reconnaissance sorties and actual arrest operations, and each and every time Jaradat was nowhere to be found. To insulate his position, Jaradat made his cousin Saleh Suleiman Jaradat his deputy. Saleh, in turn, recruited other family members to become lieutenants in the al-Quds Brigade, including his cousin Fadi. “When the men in the Jihad or Hamas called one another Ahi, or brother, it wasn’t a figure of speech,” an IDF intelligence officer commented, “it was true.”5 The family connections guaranteed that the only men who knew the whereabouts of the hunted PIJ chieftains were those who possessed clannish blood links that could not be compromised by Shin Bet pressure.
The Shin Bet campaign finally paid off: Anas Jaradat was apprehended on the night of May 11, 2003, in a lightning-fast operation by Duvdevan.* The operators from the army’s undercover unit descended on the safe house Jaradat occupied and, with a D9 ready to flatten the house, unit commanders convinced the cornered terrorist to surrender. News of the Duvdevan operation was met with grudging admiration at Ya’mas headquarters, though these sentiments were spray-painted with a muted sense of jealousy. The Ya’mas felt very proprietary about Jenin—the city few other special operations units dared to enter and the one that was considered their territory. The Ya’mas knew each intersection and street; the operators had memorized all the landmarks, and they had managed to navigate and circumnavigate through checkpoints, barricades, and other ballistic obstacles often thrown in their way. “Jenin was my favorite place to work,” Sa’ar Shine remembered. “It was compact, it was easy to navigate, and it was where we had the most work. Jenin was where we fought some of our toughest battles.”6
When Anas Jaradat was apprehended, his cousin Saleh became the area’s PIJ heir apparent. Shin Bet commanders working Jenin realized that locating a wily target like Saleh would require the skills and stubbornness of a unit that could operate for lengthy periods of time inside Jenin and the surrounding villages. When the Shin Bet contacted Uzi Levy with the Saleh Jaradat file, the Ya’mas pounced on the opportunity.
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Saleh Jaradat was not the type of fugitive who languished in one location for days on end inviting a confrontation with the Israeli security services. His legend was that of a ghost, a figure in the shadows who was always one step ahead of forces that hunted him. Everyone in Jenin and the villages around the city—especially in Silat al-Harithiya—was always on the lookout for the Mistaraboon, the Arabic word for the undercover commandos. Fugitives would try to move around from location to location during the day and find safe haven at night in order to evade the invisible eyes of the dreaded Mistaraboon. Jaradat was constantly on the move. It was a desperate attempt to remain one step ahead of the undercover operatives who hunted him. Pursuing the elusive PIJ commander required patience and tenacity.
Chief Inspector Micha Gafni, the unit’s operations officer, had served with the unit since 1991. He joined the unit as an operator in the second platoon when Eli Avram was still building the unit from nothing. He had seen how the unit grew from very Spartan beginnings, when it had to plead for a couple of operations a month to the point, as he put it, “when some of the IDF’s top units carried out one raid every couple of months or so, but we carried out two hundred or more a year. When the intelligence came in that a terrorist suspect was at home now, not an hour from now, we didn’t have to refer to IDF maps to find out where ‘Junction X’ was and where it intersected with ‘Coordinate Y.’ We had been to these places so many times we had it all memorized. We had the ability to react to immediate call-outs where we would instruct the elements of the raid on the go, via radio, as we rushed to the target. No other unit had that capability or flexibility.”7
Chief Inspector Nasser* was one of the Ya’mas officers at the center of the effort to apprehend Jaradat. Tall and lanky, with an infectious smile, Nasser was a Druze from Israel’s north; he was a family man. His kind demeanor and endearing good looks camouflaged a hardened soldier who possessed a wealth of combat experience and counterterrorist know-how that had been gained in the treacherous hills of southern Lebanon and inside the narrow confines of Hebron while serving with Egoz, the 1st Golani Infantry Brigade’s elite counterinsurgency force. Nasser joined the Ya’mas in 2001 and became one of the unit’s most capable officers. Learning every nook and cranny of the West Bank was part of his indoctrination into the unit—a critical element of being able to know how to get in and out of a place like Jenin, let alone maneuver inside the intricate back alleys of the city for hours on end. “Our men knew the terrain like the back of their hands,” Chief Inspector Nasser boasted. “They knew each hole and each landmark better than anyone in the Israeli counterterrorist community. The team leaders knew how to deal with any target—house, café, store, alleyway—and the squadron leaders and the intelligence and operational elements knew how to coordinate these activities and operations with the IDF and the support forces that might be needed.”8
But Nasser’s like-the-back-of-his-hand knowledge of the topography alone wasn’t going to locate and apprehend a man like Saleh Jaradat; the daily grind of searching haunts where the intelligence believed he might be hiding was time-consuming and physically demanding. On some operations the Israelis found themselves sitting inside the stifling Horse for hours on end. The Horses would have been suffocating even if they were air-conditioned, but they weren’t. The heat inside the Horse was oven-like. It was impossible to ventilate the interior cabin where the operators sat, and the Speakers often had to park the vehicles in the sun, cooking all those who sat inside. The effects of the heat were exacerbated by the tactical kit each operator wore—coveralls, body armor, load-bearing gear, communications equipment, and packs with extra ammunition. The entire package often weighed close to thirty-five kilograms. The air inside the small, tight space was heavy and stale; many operators were grateful that they could breathe through their balaclavas and filter out the stench. If a Horse sat on a target for three or four hours, the operators inside had to sit silently still throughout. There were no time-outs for bathroom breaks and little opportunity to stretch one’s legs.
The search for Saleh Jaradat took a toll on the entire Ya’mas force. The month of May quickly disappeared into June. There would be no breaks from the daily forays in and around Jenin—no trips home to see the wife and kids, and no free time to catch up on sleep. Any spare time was dedicated to training and the review of Shin Bet intelligence files.
As the long days of surveillance and searching passed into weeks, the intelligence on Saleh became sharper. Ya’mas teams were able to miss their elusive prey by minutes rather than hours. On June 12, 2003, the Shin Bet case officer supervising the Jaradat file came to the Ya’mas forward operating base with the encouraging news the unit had been waiting to hear for nearly a month. Jaradat had been located.
Yaakov Berman gathered the entry team and conducted a quick field briefing. The intelligence of the day was reviewed swiftly, and the operators reviewed photographs of the locations. They had done this so many times before, but nothing was ever left to chance—not even in the seven-minute world of the Ya’mas. The assault team consisted of two vehicles—an armored undercover sedan and a Horse for tactical backup. Majdi,* one of the more experienced Speakers, was driving; Chief Inspector Nasser sat next to him. Abu Ahmed, another one of the Speakers and a combat medic, sat in the backseat next to Berman. The operators heading to Jenin checked their gear one final time. They checked their weapons—M4s and Glock 17Cs—as well as their ammo pouches. There was one final radio check before the vehicles headed toward Jenin. The sun would set soon. The unit’s intelligence and operations officers made their way toward the tent where the brigade commander was waiting.
The coffee inside the command post set up outside the city was stale; it tasted horrible. The laptops were open, and the tapping of computer keys was muted by the hissing squelch of radio transmissions. The Shin Bet liaison agents walked outside for a cigarette or two; they were nervous and excited and lit new cigarettes with the burning ends of others. Ya’mas officers followed closely behind the intelligence agents, looking for their lighters inside their cargo pockets. Armies may have moved on their stomachs, but the counterterrorist specialists survived on awful coffee and nicotine.
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Members of the extended Jaradat family were enjoying a quiet summer’s night in the courtyard of their rented home in the city’s easternmost neighborhood. Saleh Jaradat was at the center of the family gathering, even though he knew that he was the target of a massive Israeli dragnet; the thirty-four-year-old was old enough and experienced enough to know that family homes were always on the Israeli radar. But being on the run, even with the popular support of sympathizers and safe houses, had taken its toll on the PIJ commander. He had been on the run for a long time, too long, and he missed his family. It had been many weeks since he had seen his pregnant wife Ismath and their two-year-old son who lived in this family enclave. Spending a few hours with them, he assessed, was worth the risk of the Israelis catching up with him. The Jaradats were, after all, preparing for a family event—a wedding. Saleh’s cousin Fadi, twenty-four, was only three days from being married. Fadi, like Saleh, was also a PIJ operative. He wasn’t at the top of the Jerusalem Brigade hierarchy, but he was a street-level commander, and worthy enough to be high on the Shin Bet’s most-wanted list.
The date for Fadi’s wedding had been pushed up because his father, Taisir, had been in and out of cancer treatments in hospitals inside Israel proper, as well as in Amman, for a long time and it was thought that by moving up the wedding, his spirits and health would improve—even if only temporarily. Jaradat weddings were huge events, especially those with the PIJ’s blessing. The invitations were sent, the wedding dress paid for and altered, and the food purchased.
Saleh and Fadi sat on a long red sofa that had been brought to the courtyard so that the family could enjoy the brief eastern breezes and escape from the stifling heat inside the house. The mood was jovial, almost relaxed. Fadi’s twenty-nine-year-old sister Hanadi sat with them. Hanadi was the oldest of nine children and was seen as an ambitious, modern, yet religious woman; many described her as stubborn.9 She had graduated from Jerash University in Amman, Jordan, and was working on her legal apprenticeship in a Jenin law firm. She was slim and attractive but, nearing her thirtieth birthday, still single. Hanadi had been engaged eight years earlier, to a distant family member who was also a PIJ member and had been killed in a shootout with the IDF. Spinsters, especially professionals working outside the home, were looked upon with suspicion in the family’s traditional religious circles. Hanadi acted like a deputy matriarch, looking after her eight siblings and helping her father with his medical care. She was particularly close to her younger brother Fadi.
Saleh and Fadi joked as they sat comfortably on the red sofa; both men drank cup after cup of strong Bedouin coffee laced with cardamom. Hanadi listened intently to the conversation and their war stories. Saleh wasn’t at ease, though. Every noise made him jump. The ghosts from the qawat al-hasa were everywhere.10 Saleh removed his calling-card nickel-plated 9mm semiautomatic pistol from the small of his back and placed the weapon on his right leg. Fadi gestured to his sister that he was thirsty. Hanadi happily ran into the house to prepare another pot of coffee. No one heard the drone flying overhead.
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The two Israeli vehicles moved slowly into Jenin. After more entries into the town than he could remember, Majdi had become an expert at driving like one of the city’s motorists: honk; brake; gas; brake; honk; and then honk again. Part of the unit’s ability to enter and exit Palestinian towns and villages depended on their skills at acclimating their speech and their behavior to the local flavor. Not driving like a Palestinian would be a telltale giveaway. The vehicles followed a predetermined path moving off the main road toward side streets and then to where they could stage and deploy around the house according to the unit’s tactical doctrine. Berman hoped that the intelligence was right.
At the Brigade CP outside of town, Ya’mas commander Levy and the operations officer Micah, listened with subdued pride as high-ranking officers complimented the commander about how effortlessly his men were pushing their way into Jenin. The live feed, transmitted from the drone flying overhead, showed the two vehicles flowing into the city center without hesitation or trepidation. The colonels and other officers watching the feed were impressed by the way the Ya’mas units always acted as if they assumed ownership of the territories they operated in. The IDF officers felt confidence in the quick, almost machine-like radio bursts Berman and his men relayed back to command. The operators were very confident under pressure—perhaps too confident.
As the vehicles neared the targeted house, Nasser carefully removed his sidearm from his holster and placed the weapon into his firm and ready grip. The operators felt slightly more at ease away from the frenetic pace of Jenin’s main avenues. There was no traffic ahead. Berman whispered into his microphone that the team was getting close. He ordered his men to get ready.
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It only took a few minutes for Hanadi to boil the coffee. There was always something cooking on the stovetops, and finding an available burner could be a challenge. Hanadi prepared the cups and the sugar and brought out the pitcher on a metal tray. She resumed her spot on the sofa near her brother and poured the coffee. The first vehicle pulled up gently in front of the Jaradat home, grinding slowly on the poorly paved road. Hanadi thought that the men inside the car were friends of Fadi. The vehicle had green-and-white Palestinian license plates.
Nasser raised his head slowly and turned slightly toward the people on the couch. Abu Ahmed recognized Saleh right away. He had spent the better part of a month memorizing every facet of Saleh’s face—his pale complexion and his ultra-straight jet-black hair parted to the side—and now he was a few feet away. Nasser noticed the pistol on Saleh’s leg.
Saleh did not flinch when the Ya’mas contingent arrived. He simply stared at the vehicles in a frozen moment of shock, one of begrudging and fatal acceptance. Saleh glanced at Nasser and then at his pistol. He tried to reach for the gun on his leg. In a matter of seconds, a month’s manhunt culminated in two shots to Saleh’s shoulder and neck. Saleh’s upper torso slithered down off the couch; his body went limp and he collapsed on the floor in a growing pool of blood. Fadi leapt off the couch the moment the shooting began. He tried to make a run for it and barricade himself inside the house; the intelligence on Fadi was that he never moved around without a weapon at the ready. Operators had jumped out of the Horse and were swarming all around the house. Abu Ahmed yelled for everyone to stand still and raise their hands in the air, but Fadi continued his move toward the house. Abu Ahmed took aim and shot him. “We were drinking coffee and then we saw a white car with Arab license plates drive up slowly and stop next to the house,” Hanadi recalled in an interview with the Jordanian newspaper al-Arab al-Yum. “I thought that they were friends of Fadi. Suddenly two men got out of the car and started shooting at Saleh. I saw Saleh lying on the ground. Then suddenly another car pulled up and people started shooting from it, too.”11 Hanadi also stated that “Fadi was still breathing. Saleh lay motionless. I saw that he had been hit in the head. Three of the soldiers spoke fluent Arabic. One of them asked me, ‘Where is Fadi’s weapon?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. He doesn’t even have a weapon.’ I saw my brother lying there. ‘Allah akbar aleikum, he’ll die.’”12
The objective of the raid was to apprehend Saleh Jaradat—not kill him. The PIJ commander had, in his head, the keys to identify layer after layer of field commanders, networks, cells, and operatives. But the operators did not pit themselves against armed individuals for the sake of possible intelligence. Even though armed fugitives who were identified as being a clear and present threat were legitimate battlefield targets, Ya’mas combat medics worked feverishly to save the lives of the two wounded men. Abu Ahmed, who was one of the team’s most experienced trauma-trained paramedics, attempted to stabilize Saleh. But Hanadi was hysterical. She jumped over her brother and was crying and screaming. “The sister was making it impossible for the medics to work,” Nasser recalled, “grabbing everyone and pulling them off and getting in the way of the efforts to save her brother’s life.”13
The Speakers could barely contain her movements and her screams. “Ichras,” Nasser ordered. “Shut up!” She didn’t stop, though; her screams grew louder. Hanadi’s commotion threatened the operational security of the Ya’mas mission. The fighters were completely outnumbered in the PIJ neighborhood. The sounds of gunfire and the initial cries of the women were an alarm in the neighborhood that forces from the qawat al-hasa were operating nearby. Berman’s arrest team expected gunfire to erupt at any moment, and from any and every corner. Nasser looked at Hanadi one more time and pleaded with her to be quiet. Her flailing became more exaggerated. So he hit her. “I slapped her so that she would be quiet. She was putting everyone at risk.”14
Saleh Jaradat was declared dead at the scene. Fadi still had a slim chance. The decision was made to load Fadi’s body into the entry car and to evacuate him to Israel, where he could receive emergency care; an IDF trauma team stood at the ready outside Jenin. The operators loaded Fadi into one of the cars and worked on him as the vehicles departed the targeted area. He would be declared dead a few minutes later.
The mission was over. One of the Shin Bet’s most wanted men had been removed from the fugitive list—the terrorist enterprise of a man with buckets of blood on his hands had been terminated. The Ya’mas operators heading out of Jenin were pleased with the results of the operation. They hoped that this was the last they’d be hearing of the Jaradat clan for a while. Mostly they hoped to have a few hours of sleep and the chance to go home and see their wives and kids. They were all exhausted.
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The funerals for Saleh and Fadi Jaradat were media events—all shaheed burials were public outpourings of rage and cries for revenge. Of course the PIJ always made sure that the media was invited to these displays. Cameramen, especially from the Western outlets, were always afforded a bird’s-eye view of the funeral procession at a point safe from the gunmen who fired volleys of rifle fire into the sky. The PIJ also made sure that the bereaved families were available for interviews. Hanadi, an eyewitness to the Ya’mas operation, provided compelling fodder for the Arab media. She was also a person of great interest to the PIJ military arm.
Although it adhered to the strictest codes of Islam—especially in its definition of a woman’s role in society—the PIJ did not express any religious or philosophical objections to using females in the execution of suicide bombing attacks. The use of female suicide bombers was both tactically and psychologically effective: as a precision tactic, they were stealth-like and far more likely to penetrate a target than a male since they aroused a lower profile of suspicion; as a psychological force, the use of women expressed a sense of desperation meant to embarrass the Israelis in the court of world opinion. Even Hamas refused to send women into Israel’s cities. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas and its spiritual leader, renounced the use of women as suicide bombers on the grounds of modesty.15 The PIJ, urged on by its political leadership in Damascus and its Hezbollah sponsors, preferred pragmatism to honor and cited a tradition, dating back to the Prophet Mohammed, that justified a wife joining the Jihad, even without her husband’s permission, to reclaim conquered Muslim lands.16
But the PIJ had used women before. A week following Anas Jaradat’s arrest, Saleh Jaradat had ordered one of his most trusted lieutenants, Kamal Tubasi, to activate a female operative for an attack in Afula, an Israeli city of forty thousand inhabitants in the Jezreel Valley located eight miles east of Jenin. The apprehension of Jaradat had to be avenged, Saleh ordered, and a bold and powerful statement had to be broadcast to the rank and file that Israeli actions would be met with death and suffering. Tubasi was a unique character in the terrorist hierarchy of Jenin. An equal-opportunity operator, he held a high military rank in several of the Palestinian factions.
Tubasi located a nineteen-year-old university student named Hiba Draghma, from the West Bank village of Tubas. Draghma had been engaged to a PIJ operative, but when he was apprehended by Israeli special forces en route to carrying out a suicide bombing, the collective family disgrace fell upon the young woman’s shoulders; blowing herself up would be considered an act of vengeance and honor. PIJ commanders dressed Draghma in a tight-fitting blouse and a pair of suggestively tighter-fitting jeans. She wore makeup and her body was sprayed with perfume. She also carried close to seven kilograms of TATP and nails inside a black pocketbook. On May 19, 2003, she was driven to the Gates of the Valley shopping mall in the center of Afula. An intrepid security guard posted to the mall’s main entrance suspected something about Draghma’s appearance and the weight of her bag. Fearful that she would be apprehended like her fiancé, before he could become a martyr, Draghma blew herself up at the security checkpoint. Three people were killed in the blast—including two security guards, both new immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union. Forty-eight shoppers were wounded in the attack.
The Afula attack was deemed as a PIJ failure—Draghma, by the blood-soaked standards set in the intifada, had not killed enough Israelis. Draghma had also proved to be a poor femme fatale for the PIJ. She was considered pitiful and gullible. Draghma had no narrative that would hold the interest in the Western media and no backstory inside the community to use as a recruitment tool for more women eager to become suicide bombers. Hanadi Jaradat was different. The PIJ believed that she could be a star.
Hanadi Jaradat had always been a deeply religious woman, but the incident on the porch of her family’s rented home propelled her deeper into the Koran and the mosque. The headhunters, those recruiting new shaheeds, were busiest around the funerals of those killed by Israeli forces—this was the time that a heart full of anger could be turned into a human missile driven by vengeance. A female operative from the PIJ, a recruiter, traveled to see Hanadi during the family’s forty days of mourning. Hanadi was an easy target for the manipulation; many other suicide bombers had been recruited in such a way.17 She was, in many ways, an outcast. The fact that she had once been engaged to be married, perhaps sexually active, had cast aspersions on her honor. She was in no frame of mind to resist the pitch and was easy prey for the PIJ sharks.18
—
In the early morning hours of Saturday, October 4, 2003, before the fall clouds could part to reveal a warm and heartening sunshine, Hanadi Jaradat received a suicide belt from her cousin Sami Suleiman Jaradat, the commander of the PIJ’s military wing in the village of Silat al-Harithiya; Jaradat had received the equipment, and the instructions for the operation, from Amjad Ahmed Abeidi, the thirty-five-year-old PIJ commander in the northern West Bank. The belt was simple in design and potent in payload; it consisted of four kilograms of high explosive surrounded by several more kilograms of screws and nails. Hanadi and Abeidi had met in a safe house.
A smuggler was hired to transport Hanadi into Israel. He was a forty-eight-year-old Israeli-Arab from Umm el-Fahm named Jamal Mahajna, who was reliable when it came to helping Palestinians cross into Israel illegally; not only did he help them cross, but he drove them in an air-conditioned van. Sami Jaradat didn’t think that Hanadi would have any problems getting into Israel. She had been given a Jordanian passport and her English was fluent. If challenged by an Israeli policeman, her cover story was that of a Jordanian tourist. It was considered a rock-solid cover story.
Hanadi Jaradat took a local commuter bus from Jenin to Barta, a village divided in two by the invisible frontier separating Israel from the Palestinian Authority. She crossed from the eastern part of town to the western half, inside Israeli proper, and hooked up with her driver. She took a seat in the front of the blue Volkswagen Transporter van. The driver watched as Hanadi changed out of her traditional clothes, a galabiya and the hijab, into Western clothes that had been prepared for her ahead of time. Peering into the mirror, Hanadi applied red lipstick and brushed her hair.
Sami Jaradat had given Hanadi strict tradecraft instructions. She was to travel south, then north to Haifa, in order to see if she was being followed and to evade any police checkpoints around the Arab villages. Mahajna drove to Hadera, a city in between Netanya and Haifa, and to the Hillel Yaffe Hospital on the outskirts of the city; Hanadi told her driver that she was searching for her hospitalized father and that she wanted to see if he had been admitted as a patient there. Hanadi said that she was hungry and she suggested that the two eat. Traffic was light on the coastal highway to Haifa. The Mediterranean glistened under the bright October sun. It was already after 1 P.M. Anyway, Hanadi promised to pay for the meal.
—
The Arab-Israeli conflict didn’t exist inside the Maxim Restaurant. Nestled along Haganah Avenue at the southern approach to Haifa along the Carmel Beach, the Maxim Restaurant was jointly owned by Arab and Jewish proprietors. Haifa was a multiethnic city that prided itself on tolerance, and the restaurant embodied that spirit of coexistence. The Maxim Restaurant was a landmark in Haifa—diners came from all over Mount Carmel to savor generous portions of grilled meats and Middle Eastern salads. The Maccabi Haifa soccer team considered Maxim a safe haven, a hangout.
The restaurant was particularly crowded this particular Saturday afternoon. Yom Kippur eve was a little more than twenty-four hours away, and it was customary for Israelis—many of whom were on holiday because of the high holy days—to enjoy eating out in the days between the Jewish New Year and the solemn fasting of the Day of Atonement. Waiters carried heavy steel trays with plates of meat skewers still smoking from the open-flame grills, and freshly baked loaves of pita bread were rushed to the tables of hungry patrons. Terrorists had blown up restaurants and cafés before, and an armed security guard was supposed to be on duty, but the man manning the front door was a waiter drafted to be a sentinel for a few hours. Hanadi and her driver were never challenged when they walked into the restaurant. There was no searching of Hanadi’s bag and no magnetometer swept across her torso. There was only a brief wait for a table.
The restaurant was noisy—Maxim always was. Children were everywhere, and some of the toddlers managed to wander away from their parents to munch on French fries smothered in ketchup as they sliced a path in between the crowded tables. Hanadi and Mahajna ordered plates of chicken kebabs along with several portions of salads; both ordered soft drinks. Jamal Mahajna ate like a man being treated to a free meal. Hanadi Jaradat barely touched her plate. Instead, witnesses would later say, she was detached. She smiled off into the distance and stared at the other diners with a satisfied grin. Hanadi told her driver that she would cover the tab and asked him to get the car ready. He grabbed a toothpick from the register and walked out the door to his van.
Hanadi didn’t stand up as the waiters cleared her table. She simply smiled and detonated the carefully crafted antipersonnel explosive device she wore on her body. The detonation eviscerated the interior of the restaurant with a violent flash. The blast blew out windows and sent shards of glass flying everywhere. Shrapnel sliced through any flesh and bone in its path—the flesh and bone of pensioners and grandparents, and the flesh and bone of mothers and their children. It was 2:18 on a sun-scorched Saturday afternoon.
The Israel National Police had received word that a possible attack, one to be perpetrated by a female suicide bomber in Haifa, was imminent. Law enforcement units were busy setting roadblocks and implementing security protocols when news of the explosion came over the emergency frequencies.19
Rescue workers who rushed to the scene were appalled by the carnage. The bodies of children sat on their chairs, their heads sliced off cleanly by the sharpened metal fragments racing through the open spaces. Blood and burned flesh were everywhere. Twenty-one people were killed in the bombing, including five members of the Almog family and five members of the Zer-Aviv family. The oldest victim was seventy-one. The youngest fatality was one year old. Fifty-eight people were critically wounded.
Jamal Mahajna was arrested twelve hours after the bombing at his home in Umm el-Fahm. He had tried to burn any evidence that Hanadi had left behind in his car. As Mahajna was being interviewed by Shin Bet agents eager to unravel the network behind the bombing, the PIJ headquarters in Damascus, Syria, released a press release claiming credit for the carnage. The operation, the communiqué said, was carried out by the “Bride of Haifa.”20
—
On the morning of October 5, a column of tanks and APCs churned its way toward Silat al-Harithiya. The armored thrust moved slowly. The vehicles—ferrying infantrymen, special operations elements, and combat engineers—ground a path behind the slow-moving Caterpillar D9 bulldozer slowly and cautiously pushing up narrow roads and around hairpin turns. Helicopter gunships flew shotgun overhead. The residents of Silat al-Harithiya knew what was happening. The Jaradat family was allowed to remove their possessions before their home was razed.
The Ya’mas operators never took the work personally. When the men prepared for a mission—one with a month’s worth of lead time or one where they coordinated the tactics en route to the target—their sole focus was on the operation: the intelligence, the risk, the tactics, and the escape plan. Who the terrorist was, who he had killed, and which organization he belonged to mattered little on the surface. The bombing in Haifa was different though. Some of the men who had participated in the Jaradat raid sat quietly the morning after the suicide bombing at the Maxim Restaurant. Some knew that they would be back in the Jenin area shortly, hunting down those responsible for the deaths of the twenty-one women, men, and children that Haifa afternoon. There was a network behind each act of terror—recruiters, intelligence-gatherers, operational commanders, facilitators, and, of course, bomb-building engineers—and the network would need to be neutralized. The operations and intelligence officers in the unit worked the phones that morning after Maxim, calling their counterparts in the Shin Bet and offering their services. Others, especially Nasser, wondered about something else. “Imagine all the lives that could have been saved,” he thought to himself with frustrated hindsight, “had I just shot and killed her.”21
The cycle of violence was not over. The Ya’mas would return to Jenin—to hunt those responsible for the most recent carnage and to hunt those who were planning and who would execute the future bloodshed.