In the Footsteps of the Philistines
Imad Hassan Imbrahim Akel had fiery ambitions that were fueled by vengeance. Akel was born in Jebalya, a United Nations–administered refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, in July 1971. Born four years after the thunderous Arab defeat in the Six Day War, Akel was raised under Israeli rule in a religious home. He had dreamed of being a pharmacist, but he had also been drawn into the life of Islamic militancy as a member of the nefarious organization that would soon become known to the world as Hamas. At the age of eighteen, Akel became a street fighter. Like many of his comrades, he was arrested by Israeli security forces and spent eighteen months in prison. Because he was known to the Shin Bet as an active participant in a terrorist organization, the Shin Bet reportedly vetoed his request to study Islamic law in Amman. Trapped inside Gaza, Imad Akel would become the commander of the military arm of Hamas.
The Izzedine al-Qassam Brigade took its name from a fiery Islamic cleric from Jenin killed by British forces in 1935 and was created by Salah Shehada, one of the founders of the Hamas terror network, who organized teams of roaming hit squads that targeted Arafat loyalists and suspected collaborators with the Shin Bet. The intifada widened the scope of these activities to include attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers. One of the first Izzedine al-Qassam Brigade campaigns was the kidnapping and murder of two IDF soldiers, Avi Sasportas and Ilan Saadon in 1989.* By 1991, the military foot soldiers of the Hamas had grown in size and scope into a full-fledged underground army that openly engaged Israeli forces in terrorist operations. Akel had impressed the Hamas leadership with his combat skills and organizational capabilities, and he was ordered to the West Bank to establish Izzedine al-Qassam cells in the major towns and villages. Akel specialized in the ambushes of Israeli military patrols in the West Bank and in Gaza, and he had been personally responsible for eleven murders, and the wounding of nearly fifty others. Hamas took notice. In May 1992 Akel was appointed commander of all Hamas forces in the West Bank and Gaza. The Shin Bet also took notice. Every Shin Bet case agent in the Strip memorized the haunted pale complexion, faint beard, and thick widow’s peak of the young man they hunted.
For two years, Akel evaded the Israeli dragnet. He never slept in the same bed twice and moved about only at night, all the while commanding an underground army of hardcore terrorists who became more emboldened with each operation. The very best of Israel’s special operations units hunted him, but no matter how many doors were kicked in and people rousted from their sleep, Akel was always a step ahead of the men with guns. Shin Bet case officers called him the man with nine lives.
Akel’s luck came to an end on November 24, 1993, inside Sheja’iya, a congested battlefield that also doubled as a neighborhood in eastern Gaza City. Countless man hours of intensive intelligence work and pre-raid reconnaissance went into the operation to catch or kill Akel, but it all culminated in a few moments of dedicated firepower. The unit that removed Akel from the most-wanted list was Samson, one of the two Israeli undercover counterterrorist units operating in the Gaza Strip.
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The population of the Gaza Strip in 1948 consisted of 82,500 men, women, and children,1 living inside a densely packed twenty-eight-mile-long, four-mile-wide wedge bordering the southwestern tip of the Israeli frontier and the northwestern shores of Sinai along the Mediterranean coast. After the establishment of the State of Israel, more than 160,000 Palestinian refugees flooded to the ancient Philistine stronghold where the Book of Judges details Samson’s destruction of the Temple of Dagon. The refugees were quickly warehoused inside eight United Nations–administered shanty camps quickly buttressed around the Strip’s three cities—Gaza City in the north, Khan Yunis in the center, and Rafah, which straddled the Egyptian frontier in the south. The camps soon became permanent, alongside an inescapable reality of poverty and hopelessness. The Egyptians occupied the Strip from 1949 to 1967, and they found it to be frustratingly contumacious and violent. Egyptian intelligence allowed the Gaza Strip to be used as a launching pad for Palestinian guerrilla, or fedayeen, attacks against Israeli agricultural towns and collectives; knowing that they could mobilize Palestinian misery into self-serving Egyptian interests by opportunistically keeping the Palestinians boiling with indignation,2 the Egyptians, like many other Arab states, could deflect their own internal fissures by mobilizing the dream of vengeance against Israel. But Israeli retaliation to each fedayeen attack was swift and severe; the precarious misery of those living in the Strip became entangled in the unstoppable cycle of violence.
The fedayeen attacks, as well as increasing tensions with Egypt, culminated with the Sinai invasion on October 29, 1956, during which Israeli forces captured the Gaza Strip.* Eleven years later, the Israeli armor fist that punched through the Egyptian lines in the opening hours of the June 1967 Six Day War once again captured the Gaza Strip—this time in less than two days of fighting. In 1956 Israeli forces remained in the Gaza Strip for five months. Following the 1967 war, Israel’s entanglement inside the volatile and perpetually explosive sliver of combustion has been ongoing.
The first years of Israeli control of the Strip was tenuous and bloody. Palestinian terrorist groups, no longer controlled by Egyptian intelligence, attempted to reclaim ownership of the Gaza Strip through violence, but Israel’s countermeasures were swift and decisive. Captain Meir Dagan’s Sayeret Rimon undercover counterterrorist unit in the IDF Southern Command was a textbook case study in the use of undercover special operations forces in crushing a terrorist uprising. Dagan’s men, deploying in small teams and in full disguise, made a point of operating everywhere in the Strip, including the treacherous and claustrophobic shantytowns of the refugee camps. Dagan wanted to send a message of Davka, or stubborn spite, to the Palestinian gunmen who thought that they could seek refuge inside the human maze of overcrowded neighborhoods that there wasn’t an inch of the Strip that his men would be dissuaded or deterred from entering.
Sayeret Rimon’s campaign—and a heavy military and Border Guard police presence—brought relative calm and moderate prosperity to the Strip—a tenuous, perhaps imagined, calm that lasted sixteen years. Gazans worked inside Israel, and the local economy improved by leaps and bounds from what it was when Egypt ruled the Strip; quality-of-life conditions, even for a population with one of the highest birth rates in the world, improved. But the calm on the surface masked the simmering fractures that betrayed the bedrock beneath.
To the more cosmopolitan Palestinians of the West Bank’s major cities—and certainly to the Israelis—the Gaza Strip was a forgotten frontier of sand-strewn misery. The Gaza Strip was conservative and, many in the West Bank would say, provincially primitive. The Palestinian symbol of nationalism was the golden reflection of the Dome of the Rock mosque—not the dusty back roads of Khan Yunis. Israelis, especially those caught up in the messianic-driven euphoria of post-1967 reconnection to the landmarks of the Old Testament that could be found in the West Bank, did not share the same connection to the biblical sites in Gaza that proved, at least in their eyes, Jewish provenance of the land. Still, Israel established twenty-one settlements in the Gaza Strip, with most being located in Gush Katif, bordered on the southwest by Rafah and the Egyptian border, on the east by Khan Yunis, on the northeast by the Deir el-Balah refugee camp, and on the west and northwest by the Mediterranean Sea. The settlements required military protection, as did the two roads that served the communities and proved to be their land links to the rest of Israel. Israeli soldiers and Border Guard policemen who served tours of duty in the Strip worked a hazardous post that few in Israel understood or cared to think of much. Gaza was distant, remote, and dangerous. By the mid-1980s, there were close to six hundred thousand people living in the Gaza Strip.
The seismic fissure came on December 8, 1987. A fatal traffic accident in the Jebalya refugee camp, near the Erez Crossing, involving an Israeli driver, brought Palestinians to the streets in the thousands. Violent demonstrations followed. The rioting that ensued was unlike anything that had ever been seen before in Gaza. It soon spread to East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The first intifada had begun.
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Unit 367, better known simply as Samson (Shimshon in Hebrew), was the IDF undercover unit in Gaza. The unit was established in 1986 shortly after Duvdevan’s creation and was the project of Major General Yitzhak Mordechai, commander of the IDF’s Southern Command. Born in the Kurdistan area of Iraq, Mordechai was a granite block of a man who earned one of Israel’s highest decorations for valor as a paratroop battalion commander during the savage battle for the Chinese Farm in Sinai against Egyptian commandos during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Mordechai had risen up the IDF ladder of command, earning his stripes and his scars on dark nights inside enemy domains, in command of small forces of elite fighting men who drastically altered the balance of power on any battlefield. Mordechai built Samson around a cadre of like-minded unconventional military thinkers—adventurous officers, all former reconnaissance paratroopers or commandos, who were keen to write history as it was fought, as well as volunteers who had special human traits that were usually sought after in spies and scoundrels. The unit’s first commander, Major Ilan,* had just completed a stint at the IDF officer’s school, serving as a battalion commander in the prestigious factory of Israel’s future leaders, when he was offered the chance to return to combat duty in the most unconventional of settings. Major Ilan was a paratroop officer and had never led men inside the covert world of shadow warfare. He accepted the daunting challenge but first conferred with commanders of the Ya’ma’m and Israel’s intelligence community. He also listened intently to the advice of Colonel Moshe Ya’alon, the commander of Sayeret Mat’kal (and future IDF chief of staff and defense minister) on the use of small teams and MOUT—military operations in urban terrain.3
Major Ilan recruited men with impeccable combat service records, virtually all of them from the paratroop brigade, who were adventurous, forward thinkers who could thrive in a rogue setting in a very dangerous theater of operations. The unit recruited men from diverse backgrounds who spoke myriad languages. Fluency in Arabic was a plus when being considered for a slot in the small unit, but it wasn’t a prerequisite. Extensive background checks were conducted on volunteers, as anyone who had had a family member killed in a terrorist attack was automatically precluded from serving in the unit; Samson wanted men who were threat-oriented and not fixated on vigilantism.4
There was no shortage of work in the Gaza Strip. Palestinian terrorist cells inside the Strip received their operational orders from PLO headquarters in Tunis, as well as from the various other fronts based in Syria and Iraq. Hamas and the nascent PIJ had for years both been viewed as challengers to Arafat and his rule, and they had been able to stockpile weapons with little interruption from the Shin Bet. The terrorists mustered an odd arsenal that ranged from medieval to Soviet-bloc: the weapons included everything from improvised hand-tooled axes and medieval flails, to Egyptian-made submachine guns left behind before 1967, to brand-spanking-new AK-47s and stolen IDF Uzis and M16s, all bought on a thriving black market of smuggled weapons. Explosives and grenades were smuggled into the porous confines of the Strip. Attacks against Israeli forces grew both in frequency and in intensity. A full-scale guerrilla war was under way—this front becoming increasingly fanatical and religious in nature.
The Samson unit was small by comparison to their West Bank counterpart, but the unit had more work than it could handle. Acting as the spearhead for Shin Bet and Military Intelligence information, the unit launched what amounted to an endless roster of arrest raids and proactive ambushes throughout the Strip; the unit captured or killed many of the most dangerous terrorists there, and their most capable commanders—such as Imad Hassan Imbrahim Akel, a man the British journalist Robert Fisk inimically called at the time “the Hamas’s greatest martyr.”5 The man who led the operation was Captain Uri Azulay, an officer who left the cloak-and-dagger top-secret world of long-range reconnaissance operations with Sayeret Mat’kal to serve as a team leader in Samson. Azulay wanted to serve where he was needed, and he brought a level of top-tier professionalism to the small force of conscripts.6
The men that Azulay and the other Samson unit officers commanded operated on pure courage and adrenaline in the hundreds of operations that they mounted in very difficult terrain. “Our enemy is the armed terrorist, not the local citizens. The people of Gaza have a right to live; they live in difficult situations, but the only ones who are targeted are those who are armed and who refused to surrender,” a team leader told his men before an operation. “I want you all to think of yourselves as wearing neckties, not uniforms, when you operate in the closed-confines of a home in search of a suspect or a family. If you have to break a wall to search for weapons or explosives, then do it, but always remember that the family that’s there has to live there after we are gone.”7
The median age in the unit was nineteen or twenty. The soldiers were young and enthusiastic, and Gaza was a highly complex and often difficult tactical terrain to navigate. During Samson’s tenure there, four of its operators were killed in action.
Major General Matan Vilnai, the head of IDF Southern Command during the violent years of the intifada and an officer who had spent his entire career in the paratroopers and its elite reconnaissance formations, understood the enormous—perhaps impossible—burden that was placed on the shoulders of these commandos in Gaza. “To build a true undercover unit that can blend itself into the terrain requires years of training and is virtually impossible to do with conscripts. You need the resources and the time to turn such a unit into a professional [full-time] force. Under these conditions, the operators were compromised quickly. The costumes only worked for the initial contact. Immediately, after the exchange of a few words, it would be obvious to the locals that they are face-to-face with a Jew and not someone born here [in Gaza].”8
Vilnai’s words praised the courage and doggedness of the Samson operators who carried out hundreds of capture-or-kill operations against a fanatical and determined terrorist foe in the Gaza Strip, against insurmountable odds. But his comments were also a begrudging acceptance that undercover work was not a temporary profession. There was, after all, another undercover unit that worked in Southern Command for the Shin Bet and the Gaza Division.
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In September 1989, a Border Guard undercover unit was established in the Gaza Strip. The unit, the first of the Ya’mas units in the Border Guard order of battle, was authorized by Chief Superintendent Husen Fares, a highly decorated Druze officer, who was the regional Border Guard commander and foresaw the value in a highly specialized Arabic-speaking counterterrorist force for the area. Fares had served in the region long enough to understand the pulse of the precinct: the Gaza Strip had been the beat for permanently stationed Border Guard companies since 1967—companies that consisted of Druze, Bedouin, Circassian, and Christian policemen who had made careers policing the treacherous precincts where the Philistines once ruled. These men not only spoke the language of the locals, understood their customs and their cultural sensitivities, but they also had a wealth of territorial familiarity with the area that a battalion of IDF conscripts could never acquire during their mandatory years of military service. These Border Guard policemen knew every Fatah sympathizer, every cleric, every law-abiding laborer trying to eke out an existence with construction jobs in Israel while living inside the sardine-like rows of cinder-block housing in the Nuseirat refugee camp, and they knew the prominent families who lived in more spacious surroundings, in the villas and penthouse flats of Gaza City. These men knew the lay of the land and they knew the currency of day-to-day existence. These men formed the original cadre of this new undercover force.
The new unit was small. Ya’mas Gaza consisted of only a handful of men, who used costumes they purchased in local markets to cobble together a wardrobe of disguises for use in the field; the unit’s miniscule fleet of unmarked vehicles was commandeered from police motor pools, as well as vehicles that were confiscated. The unit was, in essence, two separate forces: one platoon, or team, was responsible for operations in the southern portion of the Strip, to include Khan Yunis, Rafah, and the refugee camps in the central areas (Deir el-Balah, Nuseirat, and Maghazi); a second platoon covered the northern sector to Gaza City, Beit Hanoun, and the treacherous streets of the Sheja’iya, as well as the Jebalya and Shati refugee camps. But the workload was so hectic, and the pursuit of terrorists crisscrossed so many neighborhoods, that the unit was consolidated in 1990.
One of the unit’s first commanding officers was Yaakov “Kobi” Shabtai. A former paratrooper with an endearing smile and a soft-spoken confidence, he oversaw the counterterrorism landscape like a chess master viewing the board. He understood the complexities and explosiveness of the Gaza battlefield and how entrenched the terrorist underground there was. Shabtai also understood the dangers that were implicit with every Shin Bet file that came the unit’s way.
Gaza was a world unto itself—a congested labyrinth of narrow alleyways and homes. There were very few street signs in the Strip; most homes were not numbered. The intelligence that the unit received was often sketchy and incomplete. Operators routinely had to surveil a location for days—or longer—just to make sure that the targeted individual lived inside the third house from the left, and not two doors down, where twenty people slept on the floor of a one-story space. Children were everywhere, on the street and in vacant lots, at all hours of the day and night. Laundry lines intermingled with electricity lines; Dumpsters filled to capacity spilled over into puddles of raw sewage. The incessant blaring of car horns and car radios was an inescapable soundtrack to life in the Strip; carts pulled by donkeys brought produce to market. Multistory dwellings hovered over shacks. Buildings and walls were all covered in the graffiti of one group or another; it appeared as if every other structure in the Strip was still under construction. At night, under the orange glow of street lamps, ambulance sirens wailed. There was always a burst of gunfire heard somewhere in the distance. There were always street battles of some kind, somewhere. When the Palestinians and Israelis weren’t fighting each other, the Palestinians fought among themselves. There were always scores to settle. The bodies of collaborators—some who worked for the Shin Bet and others who were innocent but luckless—were usually found in the morning.
The men involved in the terror movements found sanctuary in the crowded chaos. So too did the men in the Islamic underground, who also could rely on the mosques and Islamic institutions to hide and safeguard their weapons and explosives. As the intifada turned into an asymmetrical conflict, a harbinger of worse to come, the battlefield became increasingly dangerous. Hamas and the PIJ, especially, began to display a suicidal fanaticism that had not been seen before in the conflict. Arrest raids were no longer foregone conclusions; Hamas fought back, determined to kill and eager to die. Israel’s top-tier units found the battleground to be truly foreboding.
Shabtai realized this tactical complexion of the terrain and honed a force that could penetrate these obstacles safely, seamlessly, and effectively. The masquerade was critical in these Wild West years—the ability to reconnoiter terrorist-controlled streets and neighborhoods for intelligence-gathering and arrests. Shimon, a young NCO serving inside one of the Border Guard companies in Gaza, joined the Ya’mas in 1991 after a grueling selection process and lengthy interview with the unit command echelon. As a young conscript working the Strip, he wanted to be part of this unit, the name of which, “Ya’mas,” had become legendary in terms of its James Bond–like covert capabilities. He was small-framed, and his cover was usually that of a woman—a woman in a hijab or in a full abaya black dress—or of a teenager. The ability to operate freely inside the Palestinian areas was a critical component of the unit’s effectiveness. “We operated freely everywhere and anywhere in the Strip,” Shimon recalled of those early days in his career. “We operated in markets, in neighborhoods, and everywhere else to identify suspects and to neutralize them. Sometimes there were battles, some serious ones; other times there were snatch operations and there were raids, lots of them, at night. This was the dynamic of life inside the unit, life inside Gaza. Our work was very precise, and designed to avoid hostile encounters. We arrived, grabbed our target out, and then left before anyone ever knew we were there.”9
Some of the operations involved small bands of operators, supported by an on-call backup force. Some involved the entire unit. In one operation, the hunt for a Hamas suspect wanted in Zaitun, a section of Gaza City, for the murder of an Israeli soldier, a plainclothes Ya’mas section filtered into the crowded neighborhood without the locals noticing anything out of place as the men and women moved by in a taxicab with the proper license plates. Nearby, the remainder of the Ya’mas unit, in full tactical kit, had been flown in by IAF helicopter to provide backup and disrupt any Hamas attempts to resist. The entire raid, from boots off the landing skids of the chopper to the suspect in cuffs being whisked away in a Palestinian taxi, took less than five minutes.
Gaza wasn’t for everyone, of course. Old hands likened the all-or-nothing rules to combat duty in Lebanon, where suicide bombers rammed cars into convoys, and cleverly camouflaged IEDs decimated lightly armored vehicles. The unit recruited men—conscripts and veteran policemen—who scored impressive results in their selection process and who made it through the grueling training course at the top of their class. But most important, the men who led the unit looked for people who could think on their feet and improvise. The unit looked for men who could find themselves alone and outnumbered and not panic. The Gaza Ya’mas required men with the cold-as-ice nerves of a spy and the cunning and patience of a hunter. Most important, the unit sought men who were fluid in their reaction to the unknown and who could survive the unpredictable reality of Gaza.
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In the afternoon hours of September 13, 1993, Ya’mas grabbed chairs and hovered around a battered Philips color television to watch Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat meet together on the White House lawn. Some of the men sat with their hands folded across their chests and kept saying that they couldn’t believe what they were seeing; some smoked silently, rendered speechless in utter disbelief. Some of them were already partially dressed in their Palestinian disguises, ready for the night’s mission. There were men from every ethnic and religious group watching history unfold that day. Every political persuasion was represented, as well. There were hopes for peace and fears for the future in each breath the Ya’mas operators took that unforgettable moment. Every man knew the Gaza Strip—and their role in it—was about to change forever.
Politics were never discussed in the unit, it was the one taboo of life in the field, but there were genuine misgivings about the peace process. Even if Arafat could keep his legions in check and create an atmosphere that was conducive to peace, there was still Hamas and the PIJ to contend with. Ya’mas counterterrorist operations in Gaza intensified as the plans for Israel’s withdrawal were set in motion.
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On July 1, 1994, under a cloudless Mediterranean sky, Yasir Arafat and the twenty thousand security personnel that the Oslo provisions permitted to keep peace in the newly established Palestinian Authority made a triumphant return to Gaza City. Arafat’s entourage snaked its way through Sinai, across Rafah terminal, and through a special festive trellis that had been built for the occasion. The Palestinian flag, outlawed during Israel’s administration of the Strip, flew everywhere. Tens of thousands of people rallied along the motorcade’s route to greet the moment of liberation; twice as many portraits of Arafat had been plastered along every light post, electricity pole, and wall in sight. Men in green and red berets and sage-green fatigues that had been starched and pressed for this special occasion cocooned the Palestinian leader. They carried AK-47s and brand-new pistols that U.S. aid, in support of the peace process, had paid for, in their shiny new leather holsters. The security personnel, old stalwarts from the trenches of southern Lebanon and Beirut, had followed Arafat into exile in Tunis; some had been garrisoned in prison-like barracks in Algeria and elsewhere, just waiting for the day of liberation. There were many in this ring of steel that boasted sinister CVs; some had served sentences inside Israeli prisons, while others had been incarcerated in other Arab states. The nucleus of Arafat’s new army was trained in Cairo and in Amman to meet the task of security for the planted seeds of Palestinian statehood. Egyptian and Jordanian intelligence instructors had taught these men the tradecraft of state security; CIA and other American entities had tried to instill in them the need to use that tradecraft within a legal framework. Under the protocols of the Oslo Accords, tens of thousands of weapons were permitted into the Strip to bolster preexisting arsenals. The security forces manned an astounding forty-four security checkpoints along the twenty-mile path from the Egyptian border to Gaza City.10
The euphoria of liberation ended quickly, though. The men who fought in the intifada and whose families suffered in the trenches against Israeli forces were not those who reaped the rewards of Arafat’s return. Corruption in Gaza, even by Middle Eastern standards, was infectiously rampant. The cronies who followed Arafat to Tunis and the other Arab capitals inherited the perks of governance: plum appointments and contracts that allowed them to partake in siphoning off the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing in from the United States, the United Nations, the European Union, and the Gulf Arabs. These men and their families, wearing Ralph Lauren and Rolex, honked the horns of their shiny brand-new German luxury sedans to nudge the locals out of their way. Arafat’s intelligence and security services collected taxes for protection and dealt brutally with anyone deemed disloyal, who dared to voice discontent.
Compared to Arafat and his forces, Hamas and the PIJ were—at the time—seen as clean, incorruptible. Fatah, Arafat’s own movement, had always been viewed as self-serving and opportunistic. The politicized form of militant Islam that emerged primarily in Gaza blossomed because of all that was wrong with the crony-laced world of Arafat’s professional sycophants and extortionists. The PIJ, an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, was the first to embark on the armed struggle in the name of Islam.11 Hamas would soon follow suit. Both Hamas and the PIJ harnessed religious rage with nationalistic aspirations. Both organizations, handsomely funded by donations from the Palestinian Diaspora in North America and Europe, as well as from the Islamic Republic of Iran, ran food programs for the hungry and medical clinics for the ill; they provided social services that the newly established Palestinian Authority was incapable of or unwilling to provide. Hamas and the PIJ had also, by the time Arafat arrived in Gaza City, already declared their own wars on Israel. The suicide bombings had already begun, and the Islamic groups were perceived as the vanguard of the continuing struggle against Israel. The ranks of both Islamic terror groups soon swelled with the disenchanted and disappointed who saw promise in the jihad, as well as security for their families.
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The Israeli intelligence community knew that it still had to operate inside Gaza. One such strike came on January 5, 1996, when the Shin Bet assassinated Yehiya Ayyash, the infamous Hamas Engineer. Ayyash was hiding in Gaza and was killed when an explosive-laden cellular phone that had been given him by a Shin Bet asset exploded while he talked to his father. But Gaza was, for the most part, left alone. The IDF disbanded the Samson unit in early 1996. The conscripts in the unit, and some of the officers, were reassigned to Duvdevan or to the Golani Brigade’s Egoz counter-guerrilla force that was in the throes of a lethal war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. The Gaza Ya’mas unit remained, however. Bolstered with resources as the front became ever more strategic and volatile, the unit became a full-fledged commando reconnaissance force covering the entire area.
In September 1996, the Palestinian Authority orchestrated riots throughout the territories. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the opening of the Hasmonean Channel, an archeological tunnel by the Western Wall. Clashes erupted throughout the West Bank; heavily armed Palestinian security forces joined the fight, rather than disperse the crowds. On September 27 Arafat gave the green light for his security forces to open fire. The combat was fiercest in southern Gaza, around the Gush Katif settlements and the Rafah crossing that connected Gaza, and the Sinai Desert, with the rest of the Arab world. Palestinian security forces engaged Israeli forces in open warfare and attempted, in several locations, to overrun the Israeli lines—especially Israeli forces garrisoned in and around the Termit (Hebrew for Thermal) fortification. Ya’mas snipers engaged the Palestinian forces at long range, while teams of Israeli operators fought pitched battles against an entrenched and well-equipped adversary; plumes of acrid black smoke billowed in the air from Palestinian police vehicles destroyed by Israeli fire. The most hard fought of the Ya’mas battles centered on securing and rescuing soldiers who had been killed or wounded in the voracious exchanges. Seventeen Israeli soldiers were killed in battle, including Colonel Nabi Mer’i, a Druze officer and the deputy commander of the Gaza Division. The fighting was fierce and underscored how damaged the fragile peace accords actually were.
Ya’mas veterans who had fought in Gaza for seven years straight returned to base in solemn resignation once the gunfire ended. As the men removed their gear, and tossed their fatigues stained with the blood of the dead and the wounded to the floor, these veterans of the Gaza beat realized just how explosive the area was and how dangerous it was going to be. Once the funerals were over and the postmortem of the fighting conducted, the unit hit the training grounds running. Veterans like Shimon, now an officer in the force, knew that the battle for the Gaza Strip was far from over.
The war in Gaza, in fact, had only just begun.