The Night Before Jerusalem
Veteran Israeli counterterrorist hands hated chasing the young terror chieftains. The young men in their twenties were psychopathically violent and volatile. Their behavior was rash and impulsive, and they were less susceptible to having their whereabouts compromised by wives, children, or other family responsibilities. Many of the young terrorists were children during the first intifada; their primary school education was one of street fighting and suicide bombings. Their education consisted of street justice and Israeli counterterrorist efforts—preventative and retaliatory. These young children grew up in a desensitized abyss of covert cruelty, and when they matured, they frightened the Israeli security forces that hunted them, as well as the senior Palestinian leaders who funded them and directed their actions.
Ibrahim Muhamed Mahmud Hashash was one of these young prodigies. The twenty-three-year-old Nablus native began his terrorist career in the service of the PIJ. Hashash didn’t fit the Webster’s dictionary definition of pious religious holy warrior: he rarely set foot inside a mosque, but the PIJ’s fanaticism and endless bundles of Iranian cash sparked his imagination. Hashash’s ascent up the ladder of command was swift, and he had a role in both the recruitment of operatives and the execution of attacks. But Hashash was considered too bloodthirsty even for the PIJ. He was booted from the group when he recruited a child to carry out a suicide bombing. Hashash wasn’t unemployed for long. He was offered a command-level position inside Fatah’s Tanzim. His small band of Tanzim thugs, known for butchering suspected collaborators with hatchets, terrorized much of Nablus. The Iranians saw promise in Hashash and invested in his network even though he was no longer inside the PIJ framework; the Iranians urged Hashash to carry on and expand his campaign with suicide bombings.1
Hashash possessed the DNA of a hunted man: razor-sharp instincts and the ability to smell those who pursued him even when they were nowhere close. Hashash never trusted a soul—not even those in his compartmentalized cell. But with his Iranian benefactors demanding results, Hashash was forced to expand his inner circle in the planning of a major suicide bombing operation. And that’s what the Shin Bet was waiting for.
The Shin Bet case agents assigned the Hashash portfolio had hoped to lure the wily terrorist lieutenant out of his Nablus safety zone—the back alleys of the Kasbah and the inside passageways of the Balata refugee camp—so that he could be captured more easily. Nablus was a nerve center of terrorist planning, and the Shin Bet was eager to hear details of the growing Iranian intelligence and counterintelligence presence in the city that was still fueling the intifada, five years into the conflict. But it appeared as if all sources connected to Hashash had dried up. There was no mobile phone chatter that could be used to launch a complex ELINT and SIGINT trail. There was no HUMINT emanating from Nablus even indicating that Hashash was still alive. Shin Bet investigators and A’man specialists had no launchpad from which to begin a matrix of contacts, connections, and pressure points that would help them connect the dots. All that was known was that he was holed up somewhere inside the less than one-tenth of a square mile that was the Balata refugee camp, protected by the nearly twenty-five thousand inhabitants, some there since the camp was founded in 1950. The Palestinian Authority never really took ownership of Balata, even with their American-supplied weapons and training. The camps were all the human depots of Hamas and the PIJ. Any attempt by the Israelis to retake the camp, the Palestinians always pledged, would be paid for in the blood of a great many Jewish soldiers. The 1st Golani Infantry Brigade overcame street-to-street, house-to-house, and room-to-room fighting during Operation Defensive Shield. The Shin Bet never ventured to guess how many weapons were inside Balata, but a veteran Israeli intelligence officer once dared to suggest that if a division of Israeli tanks pushed into the camp, they would find themselves outgunned.
But in April 2005, Ibrahim Hashash materialized. He was planning a significant suicide bombing against Jerusalem and his operation required subcontractors and communications. Ambitious undertakings also required risk.
The Shin Bet knew that Hashash wasn’t the type of terrorist lieutenant to be caught in bed with his girlfriend, and that it would take a complex lure to reel him out of Balata. The Shin Bet case officers were ambitious. They were confident that they had the resources and the tradecraft needed to locate Hashash. Chief Inspector Nasser was responsible for the apprehension.
It took weeks for the Shin Bet spymasters to assemble their trap. It took a little over a week for the manipulation of events to come together into an operational reality. Chief Inspector Nasser and his team were ready the moment the green light was flashed.
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One road, the 5705, led into Nablus. The thoroughfare split the city up and down its center; Balata was off a turn to the west. A Shin Bet asset, acting as a liaison, was to connect Hashash with a covert contact who had ties outside the West Bank in connection to the upcoming operation being planned. The Shin Bet plan was to lure Hashash from Balata, to a location outside the main camp entrance, where Nasser and his team of undercover operatives would be waiting. The mission was considered high risk. The date of the snatch was set for April 14, 2005. Thursday, it was hoped, was a good day to bring Hashash to justice. Traffic around the mosque was expected to be light.
There were multiple moving parts to the Hashash operation, multiple chances for Murphy’s Law to rear its ugly head and turn snatch into fiasco. Inspector Nasser had excelled in such high-risk ventures before, but the fact that the Shin Bet asset could be luring the force into an ambush was a grave concern; Shin Bet assets had lured them into ambushes before. On January 3, 1993, Haim Nahmani, a twenty-six-year-old Shin Bet case agent responsible for the al-Aida refugee camp near Bethlehem, was killed in a Jerusalem apartment by Mahmud Abu Srur, the Hamas double agent he ran.2
Nasser’s Ya’mas arrest team would have to be fluid and flexible. Hashash, fearing an Israeli plot, could send his meet on a wild goose chase that would require the Ya’mas Horse and tactical backup to go from one end of Nablus to the other. In order to eliminate the confusion that such unscripted movement could entail—especially for the Nablus Brigade commander watching the events unfold in the Command Post at the unit’s headquarters nearby—Nasser decided to place an identifying marker, a green towel, in the rear of the lead undercover vehicle. But the Shin Bet asset reported that Hashash was suspicious, especially of a particular white sedan with a green blanket that was driving near the entrance to the refugee camp. The intelligence, relayed by the Shin Bet case officer driving with them, daunted Inspector Nasser. He realized that Hashash had spotters in the field searching for Israeli commandos. Perhaps, he thought, Hashash had also positioned snipers on nearby rooftops. The afternoon sun began to wane. Nasser monitored the radio traffic through the transparent plastic earbud wedged tightly into his ear.
For the next two hours, Hashash ran the Shin Bet and the Ya’mas arrest team through a ringer of tasks and fake meets. The Israelis satisfied each challenge. First Sergeant Suleiman, who had been in the thick of many a hostile engagement with Inspector Nasser before in Tulkarm, Qalqilya, and Jenin, negotiated the Nablus traffic with a local’s flair, even managing the crowded gridlock on Abu Baker al-Sadeik Street. The Ya’mas vehicles pushed in and around the crowded market, and around the side streets that buttressed al-Najah University, leading to Omar Ben al-Khatab Avenue. Some used to joke that had Suleiman been born under different circumstances, he could have been a test driver for Ferrari.
Shortly before 1600 hours, the Shin Bet asset signaled via an SMS message that Hashash was ready to meet. The rendezvous would be at a location near the entrance to the city, a few hundred meters from Balata.
Hashash identified himself to the Shin Bet asset so that the Iranian liaison agent could recognize him. He told them that he would be waiting in front of a building on the southwest side of the street. Suleiman drove close to the meeting point and identified Hashash standing where he had said he would be, dressed in the clothes he had said he’d be wearing. Nasser radioed the Command Post. The Shin Bet agents monitoring the events from the lead Ya’mas vehicle and from the brigade CP braced themselves.
Hashash’s wily catlike instincts were razor-sharp that Thursday afternoon. As Suleiman and Nasser exited their vehicles, the twenty-three-year-old Palestinian removed a 9mm semiautomatic pistol from a clip in the small of his back. He fired wildly at the men approaching him. Realizing the risk of the operation as severe, Nasser had made sure that his men wore body armor. Just days earlier the Ya’mas had been issued with a new type of body armor that was three times as bullet-resistant and three times lighter than the previously issued kit. One of Hashash’s bullets punched Suleiman in the chest, but the round didn’t pierce the protective measures. Suleiman fell to the ground, knocked off his feet, but he took aim with his Mini-Uzi 9mm submachine gun. Inspector Nasser and the other undercover operatives that emerged from the vehicle took aim, as well. The firefight was over in a brief explosive fusillade. Hashash’s bullet-riddled body lay lifeless on a Nablus sidewalk. Ya’mas medics applied emergency aid to the Tanzim commander, and then placed him in the back of a Horse, where he was to be rushed to an aid station for life-saving surgery. But Hashash died en route to the hospital.
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The Shin Bet had really wanted the chance to question Hashash about Iranian intelligence activities in the area. Iranian money and spies, with aid from Hezbollah, attempted to fan the flames of an intifada whose fires had already been blazing for nearly six years and had cost Israel more than one thousand lives.
Ibrahim Hashash had been in the final stages of coordinating a catastrophic suicide attack aimed at the heart of downtown Jerusalem, the Israeli capital. The Tanzin operation was imminent—certainly no more than a day or two from being launched. The target could have been a bus full of commuters or a café packed with young men and women trying as best as possible to shake off the pressures of life inside the crosshairs of the intifada. Once Hashash was removed—compromised by a Shin Bet machine that grew more efficient with each day—his cell collapsed. People who might have been killed a night away were allowed to continue with the rest of their lives because of endless hours of intelligence work encased in risk and intrigue that culminated in a brief exchange of gunfire on a litter-strewn patch of West Bank pavement.
The efforts of the Judea and Samaria Ya’mas unit, together with the activities of other counterterrorist units and the construction of the separation barrier all along the Green Line, had dramatically decreased the ability of the terrorist groups to infiltrate suicide bombers into Israel’s cities. The greater metropolitan areas along Israel’s coastal plain were becoming much harder to hit. But Jerusalem, a ground zero of religious passion claimed by the world’s three great monotheistic religions, remained a tempting target for bloodshed. Jerusalem was the symbolic tripwire that always had the potential to turn the intifada into a religious war that could spread far beyond the regional battlefield.