CHAPTER TWENTY

Mogadishu

The first word of the mission reached Ya’mas headquarters very early in the morning—before any of the officers had had time to sleep much, and before the first cup of high-octane rocket fuel coffee could hit their systems. Operations of this size and magnitude were usually in the works for weeks, if not longer, but this call to action was immediate. The officers, reviewing the orders, did not like anything on such short notice.

The Palestinian terrorist campaign was spiraling out of control. The seizure of the Karine A was a stark and conclusive statement that the Palestinians, enlisting sponsors with deep pockets and vast arsenals, had hoped to escalate the intifada into a full-blown Middle Eastern war. The long-range capabilities of the weapons seized—as well as Arafat’s long-range strategic intentions—were game changers. The Israeli response would be symbolic and measured. The target circled in red on the map by the generals in Tel Aviv was the seven-story broadcast center in the Ali el-Muntar section of Gaza City that had transmitted inciting propaganda to the entire area; the station, used as a media hub for all of the Palestinian factions, including Hezbollah, had been a propaganda tool in the recruitment of operatives and a strategic—and tactical—link with cells operating in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The decision to destroy the facility was made in a midnight meeting at the highest levels. Ya’mas operations and intelligence officers were fine-tuning the details of the commando strike by breakfast.

The broadcast center had to be taken out by men on the ground. The IDF General Staff wanted to avoid unnecessary collateral damage at all costs—otherwise an IAF F-16 would simply have dropped a one-ton bomb on the building and returned to its hangar before the dust cloud of debris cleared. Ali al-Muntar was a heavily populated area in the eastern part of Gaza City and one of the few areas of the Strip with hills; the area’s high ground, in fact, had made it a formidable Ottoman Turkish fortress meant to stop colonial forces during the First World War. To the southwest of Ali al-Muntar was the Karni Crossing, a cargo terminal on the Israel–Gaza Strip frontier that was opened in 1994 to enable Palestinian merchants to export and import goods.

The plan called for a small force of Ya’mas operators to spearhead the takeover of the broadcast center and secure the location while combat engineers rigged the building with explosives. The building was known as a Fatah nerve center—heavily armed members of Arafat’s security services, especially the notorious Force 17 Praetorian Guard, had fortified positions nearby. In the effort to keep civilian casualties down to a minimum and limit the collateral damage, the Israelis announced that they’d be coming and warnings were issued for the residents of Ali al-Muntar to keep off the streets.

The staging area for the raid was a forward base used by the Giva’ati Infantry Brigade’s Almond Battalion at Netzarim, near the Mediterranean coast deep into the Strip. Because of the heavy gunfire that the assault force was expected to encounter, the eighteen men participating in the raid were to cross the six miles of thick Gaza squalor inside the belly of three Merkava Main Battle Tanks; the cargo hold of the tank, where the forty-eight 120mm shells were stored, was emptied in order to make room for the twelve Ya’mas operators and the combat engineer demolitions experts. A backup force of Giva’ati infantrymen, and the raid’s overall command echelon, would follow in armored personnel carriers.

Chief Inspector Shimon commanded the Ya’mas portion of the operation. This sort of conventional commando strike wasn’t the Ya’mas specialty, but they knew the terrain and they knew the language. Their assignment was to clear the building of all noncombatants and secure the perimeter so that the combat engineers could work safely and quickly inside the building.

Shimon and Yaron selected their men and used the daylight hours to review the brigade intelligence files, aerial photographs, and route maps. Yaron, whose background was as a training officer, found an abandoned structure so that the men could practice room clearing. The day evaporated in the exhausting pre-raid preparations. The Ya’mas operators ate a small dinner and then reviewed the intelligence once again. They suited up shortly before 2200. The hope was that the force would be back for the debriefing before dawn, but hopes were usually dashed inside the unpredictable bullet trap of the Strip. The operators grabbed extra provisions. Pistol and M4 magazines that could no longer fit inside pouches were crammed inside trouser cargo pockets. It was closing in on midnight.

It was just after 2300 when Lieutenant Colonel Erez Katz, the Almond Battalion commander, addressed everyone participating in the assault in order to outline each and every aspect of the operation. His infantrymen were conscripts, as were the combat engineers; some were only a year out of high school and a few months out of basic training. The soldiers struggled to balance the weight of their body armor and equipment with the clashing forces of fear and adrenaline that raced through their veins. Many of the infantrymen were half the age of the Ya’mas veterans who stood nonchalantly next to them. The thumping cadence of a helicopter gunship was heard in the darkened skies to the north. A crisp winter’s wind flowed in from the sea. The hatches of the armored vehicles were sealed and the engines fired up. The convoy crossed into Palestinian territory at 2330.

The tanks were claustrophobic, the air inside stifling. The fifteen-hundred-horsepower turbocharged engine created a disheartening vibration that those unaccustomed to armored warfare found unnerving. The Ya’mas operators preferred to enter Gaza silently, stealth-like on foot, or inside any vehicle that you could see out of. The men inside each tank sat silently for the slow journey, as the Merkava’s heavy tracks ground a course for the sixty-five-ton behemoth across dirt roads and paved thoroughfares. The deeper the convoy pushed into Gaza City, the more frequent the ping of AK-47 rounds bouncing off the Merkava’s top-secret composite armor.

The armored vehicles arrived on schedule but were met by a thunderous greeting of small arms and sniper fire. The rear latch doors of the Merkava tanks were lowered slowly. The twelve Ya’mas operators and the six combat engineers rushed out of the hulking vehicles and into the building to evade the rounds that whizzed dangerously close overhead. The Shin Bet had sent a warning to their Palestinian counterparts informing them of the raid, but the gesture meant to avoid an armed clash had only served as an invitation to those itching for a fight. Clearing seven stories of rooms, offices, closets, and corners should have been assigned to a sizeable contingent of tactical operators, but the task was left to only a handful of men from the Ya’mas. Danger lurked everywhere inside the building; the search for explosives and booby traps was as extensive as the hunt for hidden gunmen. Shimon and Yaron, along with their squads, had to spread out and methodically search every corner of the building as they made their way up toward the roof. Technicians and broadcasters, defiantly preparing the next day’s programming, had to be convinced to leave. The Ya’mas Arabic-language skills were essential in deescalating a potentially explosive confrontation, as the broadcasters angrily left the building.

But there were Palestinian gunmen in the building who refused to leave. They barricaded themselves inside offices and reception areas, and fired at the encroaching Ya’mas forces. Fierce battles developed in stairwells and inside studios crammed with sound-attenuating foam and expensive electrical equipment. A Palestinian gunman standing by a window was killed when he opened fire on the Ya’mas, and his body was thrown to the street below. When Shimon made it to the roof, he radioed Lieutenant Colonel Katz that the building was secured and that the demolitions team could start their work. The Ya’mas room clearing had taken all of twenty minutes.

Shimon positioned his men on the rooftop. Snipers peered through the scopes of their rifles to scan the horizon. The night was murky and an orange haze glistened over the darkness. The Ya’mas contingent attempted to locate—and neutralize—the source of sporadic gunfire directed toward the broadcast center from the outer periphery. But then the call to war came from a nearby mosque, broadcast on speakers usually used to summon the faithful to prayer. The Israeli Army was nearby, a voice bellowed in a loud and resolute message that sliced through the night, and everyone with a weapon was urged to kill them.

Suddenly, the snipers noticed hundreds of figures scampering in the distance, closing range on the Israeli perimeter. Gunmen invaded nearby apartment blocks and began firing at will toward the seven-story structure, from the living rooms of families woken by the developing battle. Tracer rounds crisscrossed the darkness from everywhere, in a dazzling display of green light. Shimon ordered his snipers to engage.

The battle raged for over an hour. The Palestinian gunfire was incessant. So too was the Ya’mas response. The snipers and their designated marksmen were able to pick off the figures in the shadows taking aim with their AKs. Quite a few were killed in the exchange, but still they continued to come in the hundreds. Shimon checked with the battalion commander. The charges were in place. Nearly ninety minutes had passed since the rear doors of the tanks had been lowered to launch the strike, and now the building was ready for obliteration. The soldiers and Ya’mas operators were ordered out. Officers made sure that no man was left behind.

The Speakers used megaphones and the loudspeakers on the armored vehicles to implore residents to go nowhere near the building. The warnings were emphatic; the message that the building was rigged with explosives and that people were to stay far clear was repeated in impeccable Arabic over and over again. The operators called these endeavors “Discotheque”: like DJs calling dancers to the floor, the Speakers called on local residents to stand back.

The Israeli raiders returned to their tanks and APCs to begin the slow-moving journey out of Ali al-Muntar. Heavy bursts of machine gun fire were launched at the Israeli armor; Palestinian snipers did their best to try and shoot at the tank commanders, in the hope of disabling one of the tanks, but the convoy pushed ahead toward Israeli lines. A radio signal detonated the carefully placed explosive charges, causing the seven-story structure to implode and collapse to its foundation. The mission had been a success. Seven Palestinian gunmen had been killed in the mini-battles that developed. There were no Israeli casualties.

Chief Inspector Yaron always made sure that new operators to the unit received a proper welcome when arriving at the Ya’mas home base near Kissufim Junction. He made sure that each new man’s paperwork was in order, and he personally walked the new arrivals through the process of receiving their coveralls, web gear, weapons, and a bunk in their team’s quarters. Yaron made sure that each man was fed and that he had time for a coffee. And then he popped a videocassette into a battered VCR so that the men could watch a movie. Every member of the Gaza Ya’mas force was treated to Yaron’s personal theater of the 2001 film Black Hawk Down, directed by Ridley Scott and scripted by Ken Nolan.

There were lessons—operational and tactical—in the story of America’s top-tier special operations forces and a raid that turned into a desperate battle for survival inside the heart of a city ripped apart by famine and guerrilla warfare. And Yaron appreciated just how effective a learning aid a Hollywood blockbuster could be. But rather than revel in the big picture, he was determined to show how improper planning and Murphy’s Law could turn any operation into a deadly fiasco. “Never ever go out in the field without all your gear,” Yaron used to tell the men following the film. “You never know when a three-hour operation will turn in a three-day ordeal.” But there was another, more daunting, similarity between the events of Black Hawk Down and the Ya’mas campaign in the Gaza Strip. The Ya’mas found itself operating in every corner of the Gaza Strip, often seven kilometers deep inside Palestinian territory, all alone and surrounded by thousands of heavily armed men. Every day in Gaza had become Mogadishu.

The Ya’mas mission in Gaza was threefold: serve as a rapid response force to counter any terrorist attack against the Israeli settlements that dotted the northern, central, and southern tiers of the Strip; carry out special assignments for the command and for Israeli intelligence against hostile terrorist targets in Gaza, to include the capture or killing of high-value terrorist suspects; and spearhead operations meant to stop the flow of arms and explosives reaching the terrorist groups through the smuggling tunnels that popped up along the entire Egyptian frontier. Every Israeli operation inside Gaza resulted in a full-blown battle. Other elite units, including Israel’s top-tier forces, soon began to seek assignments against targets there. The Shin Bet preferred, almost exclusively, to use the Ya’mas.

Every encounter turned into a battle, and every battle turned into a daylong military endeavor that was complex, high-risk, and involved tanks and helicopter gunships. On December 6, 2002, a raid into the Bureij refugee camp, a sprawling squalor of 33,000-plus inhabitants squeezed into one-fifth of a square mile, in the center of the Gaza Strip, turned into a daylong battle. The raid had been planned as a tweezers operation, but it turned into an all-hands conflagration when mosque loudspeakers urged all armed men to join the fight.1 Ten Palestinians were killed in the fighting.

The following day, combat engineers worked under fire to neutralize a forty-five-kilogram IED that had been buried underneath a stretch of roadway that was patrolled near Khan Yunis. There was what appeared to be an inexhaustible supply of military-grade explosives entering the Gaza Strip. The devices, as well, were of an intricate sophistication that had not been seen since Hezbollah’s use of powerful IEDs during the IDF’s costly anti-guerrilla campaign in southern Lebanon; it was believed that Hezbollah bomb-builders, true masters at creating camouflaged improvised explosive devices, had been smuggled into the Gaza Strip through Egypt in order to help Hamas and the PIJ create their own highly sophisticated explosive workshops.2 Ya’mas teams embarking on missions inside the Strip soon located IEDs planted in rubbish bins and even on the outer walls of family homes. On some missions, the unit ventured into the Strip together with explosive-sniffing dogs from the IDF’s elite Oketz (Hebrew for “Sting”) K9 unit. Dangerous work was becoming all the more treacherous.

The objective of all Ya’mas operations was to get in and out of an area without being noticed. Although the Gaza Strip was sealed off by barbed wire fencing, walls, sensors, and other barriers meant to stop all traffic in and out, with the exception of the controlled crossing points, the unit had a series of locations that only they knew about where they could enter the Strip concealed from prying eyes. Entries were all about stealth. Palestinian dogs barked at anything suspicious that moved in the night, so unit operators would immerse their coveralls and their load-bearing gear near garbage fires, in order for the garments to smell like burned trash and confuse and quiet the dogs. Speakers—and the unit veterans whose Arabic was passable—would sometimes enter the Strip in costume, walking point for the remainder of the raiding force that would walk quickly and silently behind them. Many operations required that the Ya’mas team deploy on foot, sometimes but not always followed by backup teams in vehicles. Often, a target could be as close as several hundred feet to a kilometer away from the point of entry, but other times unit personnel walked ten kilometers or even more toward their target. The classic use of the undercover unit Horse was not applicable to the Gaza battlefield. There was always a drone or an aircraft hovering overhead to monitor the unit’s progress and to provide eyes-in-the-sky real-time intelligence. A force of tanks and APCs was always at the ready to respond to any trouble; a Cobra or Apache gunship hovered to react with missiles at a moment’s notice. The mood in the CP, where the unit commander and his IDF and Shin Bet counterparts looked at shadows on the screen, was always nail-bitingly tense.

The Gaza Strip, for all intents and purposes, was another country—another universe—from the West Bank and Jerusalem. “There were actual borders separating Gaza from Israel, true barriers and obstacles, and permanent crossing points,” a veteran counterterrorist officer explained about operations in the Strip. “Gaza, to many in the defense establishment, was no different than Syria or Lebanon; it was enemy territory rife with risk. Once we were inside, we were in a foreign universe of absolute danger where we knew of the horrible fate that would befall us if any of us were captured. Even if killed, we knew that our corpses would be violated and then held as bargaining chips. But there was also great reward in Gaza. Gaza was where the terrorist leadership lived and operated openly.”3

Dozens of top terrorist commanders were killed in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military and intelligence services: on February 13, 2001, an IAF AH1-S Cobra helicopter gunship fired three missiles at a Hyundai driven by Mas’oud Hussein A’ayyad, a colonel in Arafat’s Force 17 and a man identified by Israeli intelligence as behind efforts to establish Hezbollah cells in the Strip; and on July 23, 2002, an IAF F-16 dropped a one-ton bomb on the home of Salah Shehada, the commander of the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigade (the bomb killed Shehada, his wife and daughter, and twelve others, in addition to wounding 150 more and destroying much of the Gaza City block). There were other airborne targeted killings, as they were known in the Israeli vernacular—some run-of-the-mill, others game changing. The campaign in Gaza, though, could only be won by a relentless ground effort to unnerve the terrorist underground and place them in such a state of fear and disarray that their focus would be on day-to-day self-preservation rather than attacks against Israel. The role of the Ya’mas teams in Israel’s campaign targeting the top Palestinian terrorist leadership remains classified.

The Ya’mas work schedule was one of absolute overload. The operational calendar encompassed ambushes, rotating deployments to the settlements, direct action work with the Shin Bet, and of course arrests. The week passed by quickly. There was little time to sleep, let alone think. Any free time was dedicated to training: shooting on the range, perfecting vehicle takedowns in squad-size ambushes, and unit-size exercises involving large-scale apprehension techniques. When they weren’t leading the teams and squads in the field, Ya’mas officers and NCOs were always behind a desk putting the last details of plans together, or they were in a vehicle, rushing from one location to another. It was better, some thought, not to have any downtime, since it was usually spent fast asleep slumped over in a horrifically uncomfortable position.

Unit commanders attempted to allow their men to maintain something of a regular schedule that enabled those with wives and children to maintain the semblance of a normal existence. Weekend leaves were cherished. Wives were happy to see their husbands, and the men were deliriously grateful to see their small children. Leaves began on Friday, usually before noon, and the men were expected back at base bright and early Sunday morning to start the operational workweek. When the week’s calendar was marked off with scheduled apprehension raids, the men were paged Saturday afternoon and ordered back to base. The arrest procedures involved an absolutely excruciating work schedule. Some of the arrest operations were multipronged and far-reaching and incredibly ambitious for a battlefield so treacherous. In one dragnet, in Khan Yunis, the Ya’mas spearheaded a four-tiered entry into the Strip to simultaneously take down four high-ranking Hamas commanders. The operation required that a large portion of the force enter Khan Yunis undercover, while another force, in full tactical attire, was supported by armor and mechanized infantry.

“We were a service provider,” commented Vlad,* a no-nonsense product of the Soviet republics who had fought with the Ya’mas immediately in the undefined days following the Oslo Accords and then returned to the Ya’mas when the war broke out. “We were there to provide the Shin Bet with tactical answers to their needs. Each success we had, each ambush carried out in which terrorists were killed, and each arrest mission where we brought a high-value individual back for questioning, earned us more work; greater responsibility and greater expectations. Commanders, at the brigade and battalion level, and at much higher ranks, soon were on a first name basis with many of us.”4

Brigade and divisional commanders were always reticent about arrest operations in Gaza because they were so involved and so high threat. But as the conflict continued with no sign of abatement, the Ya’mas began to apprehend more and more high-value targets in an intensive schedule of deep-penetration forays.

In December 2002, one of the names that popped up repeatedly on the Shin Bet’s radar was Yassin Ayda, a Hamas weapons officer and the architect of a long string of mortar and bomb attacks against Israeli settlements and Israeli forces in the area. Ayda was one of the top Hamas commanders in the southern portion of the Gaza Strip; the men he commanded attempted to hit the settlements of Gush Katif on what appeared to be a daily basis. The Gaza Division assembled a voluminous rap sheet of strikes—and attempted strikes—that had been perpetrated by Ayda’s cells. He was in charge of dozens of operatives, the Shin Bet surmised, and he had links to other cell commanders throughout the Gaza Strip as well as to smugglers and operatives on the Egyptian side of the border that fed his cells with a healthy supply of weapons and ammunition. The Shin Bet wanted to place him inside an interrogation facility and find out everything he knew, and to get the names and numbers of everyone he knew. The mission was handed off to the Ya’mas.

Unlike many of the top-level terror suspects in the West Bank, Ayda did not sleep in a different bed every night and emerge from his hiding spot surrounded by a phalanx of armed guards. Ayda hid in plain sight, in his home with his wife and children, in the center of Khan Yunis, almost daring the Israelis to come and get him; the neighborhood where he lived was a small metropolis of buildings, crowded streets, sprawling avenues, shops and cafés, schools, mosques, and an intertwining network of alleyways that were maze-like and treacherous. There were 142,000 residents in Khan Yunis, all packed inside twenty-one square miles of poor urban planning and abandoned civil services. The city’s residents possessed a reputation of being resilient and stubbornly defiant—first against the Ottoman Turks, then against the British, as well as against the Egyptians, and finally the Israelis. The Palestinian Authority thought that it controlled Khan Yunis, but the city was unquestionably a Hamas bastion.5

The Ya’mas had been to Khan Yunis before, after all. Some of the veterans, such as Inspector Shimon, who had been serving in the Strip for fourteen years, had the name of each street, each alley, engraved inside their memory banks. Shimon knew the names of the prominent clans who lived there, he knew which streets were most exposed to sniper fire, and he knew the quickest ways in and the most direct lanes out. From locations alongside the intricate, crisscrossing, almost M. C. Escher–like labyrinth of entry points and access roadways—hidden and some less so—the unit didn’t consider it a significant challenge to enter the confines of Khan Yunis covertly. But getting out of Khan Yunis safe and sound—with a high-value target like Ayda in tow—was not going to be easy: one trip wire pulled, one cat stepped on, one potted plant knocked to the ground, one misplaced cough, and the stealth-like entry would be compromised and the raiding force subjected to fire all around. There could be no Hunting Days like in the West Bank—no prolonged forays to target a ledger list full of suspects and see who popped up on the radar. In the Strip, each operation was finite and pinpoint. Each entry demanded precise intelligence and enormous resources set aside to back the force up and pull it out of harm’s way. Each arrest operation was a full-blown military commitment.

The details of every Ya’mas foray inside Gaza required intensive preparation. The Speakers needed to rehearse their role in reaching the target first—some in disguise, and others in full tactical kit—to be followed by the remainder of the assault force that would cordon off the home and secure it. Additional units of Ya’mas operators would then flood the area and create a ring-tight perimeter so that the arrest team, along with the Shin Bet case agents, could make the identification and apprehension. The Shin Bet agents always came along. Sometimes they dressed as one of the Ya’mas operators; other times, to their choosing, they wore the casual shirt and blue jeans uniform that personified their gritty work.

The Speakers, along with the backup forces, would usually prepare for the operation on a mockup of the targeted location. Sometimes, a building with the same layout could be found in one of the army bases or towns of southern Israel close to the Gaza Strip. Other times the unit would simply find some plywood—by hook or by crook—and build the mockup on their own. Thousands of collective man hours went into determining the minutest details of each and every operation. Nothing would be left to chance. The exhausting question-and-answer session of Mikrim ve’Tguvot that Shimon would make the officers and NCOs go through was designed to make sure that every scenario, any contingency, and any bizarre possibility was considered well in advance. The arrest plans had to be approved at the brigade and then divisional levels. There were lots of moving pieces to effect one man’s apprehension.

The Yassin Ayda raid was slated for just after midnight on December 10, 2002. The forecast called for stormy skies.

Winter was a good time for arrest operations. The cool winds that hit off the Mediterranean shore limited the number of people moving about late at night. Most families were huddled together under blankets in an attempt to stay warm; those lucky enough to have a space heater and functioning electricity to power it were able to avoid the chill with better success. A few taxicabs could be seen maneuvering through the empty streets at top speeds. The fares were few and far between. Impromptu roadblocks always sprang up. Gangs allied to Hamas, or the PIJ, always attempted to profess their territoriality with an armed showing. The mosques, though, ran a 24/7 operation. There were always gunmen near the mosques.

The Speakers and their tactical support moved silently in the Khan Yunis dark, darting in and out of the shadows. Dogs barked in the distance. The Speakers demonstrated remarkable poise as they walked forward, knowing that untold numbers of Hamas gunmen were all around, and only a few heavily armed men had their backs. The exact foot route had been predetermined days in advance. Aerial photographs had mapped out the path. Extensive intelligence files had choreographed every step that the operators would take toward Ayda’s house. The Speakers moved gingerly under the winter sky and the orange glow from the few streetlights that worked. The cover story had been worked on at headquarters, together with Shin Bet coordinators; the Speakers had spent days practicing their Gaza slang and researching the latest and greatest inside the Strip, in case anyone popped out of the darkness to challenge them. As the Speakers walked forward, they searched for trip wires and IEDs. The first pincer of the tactical force moved closely behind. The men raised their weapons toward the windows and openings they encountered. Not everyone was asleep. The sounds of pots and pans clanking together could be heard coming from some of the homes. Some of the men heard the low-volume hum of ballads coming from a radio.

The targeted house was one of two three-story homes that made up a complex for an extended clan and were typical for the Strip. The clan, generations of the same family, lived in the homes that had been dormered in a jigsaw puzzle manner to accommodate a growing patriarchal family. The homes were situated on a side street, cornered on three sides by alleys. The building where Ayda was reportedly living was dark and isolated.

The raiding force moved silently in and out of the shadows and into position. One element covered their north, east, west, and southern points, securing the building. The Speakers, who had moved ahead of everyone else, lowered their balaclavas over their faces. The code word was transmitted for the rest of the arrest team to race on in.

The distance between the Israeli point of entry and Ayda’s house was just a few kilometers. It took the entry team, in vans and military vehicles, only a few minutes to reach the targeted buildings. The procedure mandated that one force search the house, together with the Shin Bet case officer, while the other two secure the perimeter and hold off anyone who might attempt to interfere with the arrest operation. The ideal scenario for an entry team was to snatch the target while he was still asleep. There were operations when the Speakers made it to the house, the entry force entered the location, and the suspect was cuffed without anyone in the house knowing what was happening until it was too late; sometimes, the terror groups only learned that one of their own had been seized days after he had spent a fair amount of time talking to the Shin Bet. It was hoped, at least, that in Ayda’s case he could be found quickly and whisked away with little fuss. But the first search yielded nothing. Family members living in apartments were brought outside and questioned while a bomb-sniffing dog from Oketz was brought in to search for booby traps and any caches of arms and explosives that could be on the premises. The entry team found nothing, though; their search was thorough, but apparently Ayda wasn’t at home. The operators were under strict guidelines not to disrupt any element of the home as long as their lives were not in danger, though items such as floppy disks and papers were gathered for their intelligence value. But the target of the operation was nowhere to be found.

“He’s not here,” one of the Ya’mas officers told the Shin Bet case agent as the sounds of distant shots became more prevalent. “We’ve looked everywhere.”6 The Shin Bet officer looked at his mobile phone and dismissed the Ya’mas findings. “He’s here,” the man in his thirties said, careful not to remove the balaclava that had become uncomfortable during the search, “look again.”7 The force was ordered in again.

Outside, along the perimeter, the odd gunshot turned into a flurry of tracer rounds and automatic bursts. Some of the conscripts, new members to the unit who had yet to be truly tested under fire, needed one of the older hands to calm them down. Their trepidation was well founded. Soon all of Khan Yunis would be alerted, one of the operators thought. How long will the search go on? But then Lior,* the team leader responsible for the perimeter force, heard a noise coming from one of the rear doors. “Tawaqaf, Jesh,” Vlad yelled in Arabic laced with a distinctively Urals accent, as he identified himself as a soldier and ordered anyone out there to stop. The perimeter commander radioed the incident to the men directing the entry team, but they assured everyone that the house was empty. The perimeter team grew nervous. The operators raised their M4s all around, worried that they were being set up for an ambush. They scanned the house—and the doorways and windows—with their night-vision goggles but could see no movement. “We were focused on any place where the suspect could escape from,” Vlad reflected. “If he tried to flee we would have been right there on top of him.”8

Lior was convinced that the unit has missed something, and once again he ordered the search of the premises. The entry team departed to the perimeter and the perimeter team entered the house to search. The operators looked under beds and in closets. Cupboards in a kitchen were searched as the men used the flashlights attached to their M4s to illuminate every crevice and corner of the home. The team searched storage areas above closets and inside the cramped apartments, storerooms, and large interconnecting passageways that were built when the house was modified to accommodate the growing extended family. The only part of the house that hadn’t been searched was the roof—protocols dictated that the search parties avoid rooftops for tactical considerations. But Ayda was high-value, and the noises heard outside indicated that he was nearby.

Several men positioned themselves in a single-line stick formation at the foot of a small staircase leading toward a landing by the roof. Lior, the team leader, was on point. He inched his way upward. The staircase was narrow; the marble tiles were slippery. Lior meticulously placed his feet, negotiating each step cautiously; one of the unit’s veteran Speakers followed right behind him. As Lior neared the top of the stairs, he caught a fleeting glimpse of a shadow moving slowly in a corner behind a rooftop wall. He moved forward and quickly took aim. The face he saw resembled the Shin Bet wanted sheet mug shot of Ayda, but he didn’t know if the suspect was armed or not, and that impacted what level of force could be used—it was within legal guidelines to shoot an unarmed suspect in the legs in order to immobilize him; the appearance of a firearm, or any other weapon, justified the use of lethal force.

Lior’s procedural dilemma was solved when Ayda tossed a pipe bomb at the approaching Ya’mas stick. The device landed at the foot of the staircase, but failed to detonate. Lior took aim with his M4 and pulled on the trigger, but his assault rifle jammed. Lior reached for his secondary weapon, a 9mm pistol, but Ayda moved to swing his AK-47 at the approaching Ya’mas team. Before Lior could reach his sidearm, the operator standing directly behind him took aim and fired a dedicated burst at center mass. Ayda was thrown off his perch by the multiple hits to the chest and midsection, and he landed on the pavement of the alley below. The Shin Bet was right. Ayda had been at home all along.

The alleyway was strewn with litter and small puddles of rainwater from a previous day’s storm. Ayda was still alive, still conscious, and he even tried to crawl away from the Ya’mas operators in the alley. He was quickly cuffed and searched. He was loaded onto one of the Ya’mas vehicles, with Ya’mas paramedics at his side.

Khan Yunis had already been awakened to a call to war. The sounds of shots fired awoke many inside the neighborhood, and many nearby, to the presence of Israeli forces. The mobile phone networks were abuzz with SMS messages and calls summoning armed men into the fray. The drone overhead transmitted images of dozens of men emerging into the dark Khan Yunis night; soon there would be hundreds of armed men moving toward Ayda’s besieged house. Every operation became Black Hawk Down. Racing rounds, illuminated into a fierce glow, flew nearby, hitting the nearby buildings and causing plaster and concrete to fall to the street below. The Ya’mas force returned fire, selectively pinpointing hostile targets, careful to avoid hitting buildings or individuals who weren’t armed. The radio frequencies were overloaded with transmissions and updates. Ground assets were on standby, as were IAF attack helicopters. Medical evacuation helicopters were on call, as well—if one of the Israelis was wounded, he would be airlifted to the trauma care unit at Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, the largest hospital in southern Israel and one of the most experienced combat medical facilities in the world.

The Ya’mas force was virtually surrounded, albeit with access to a narrow escape path secured by IDF infantrymen. The undercover operators fought while positioned back-to-back, fighting threats all around, waiting for the order to withdraw.

The search of Ayda’s secluded rooftop hiding spot revealed an impressive arsenal. Canvas satchels were shielded from overhead view by a corrugated metal awning. Ya’mas operators found AK-47s, pistols, suicide vests, hand grenades, explosives, wiring, and enough ammunition to equip a platoon. Seven sophisticated pipe bombs were also found atop the roof.9 The raid commander did not want to leave the explosives behind, nor was he going to transport the volatile materials inside the cabin of one of the Ya’mas Horses, so he ordered his men to grab the firearms and bring them to the vehicles down below and summoned a D9 that was on standby as part of the rescue force. When dawn broke, there would be nothing left of the explosives or Ayda’s hideout. Gunfire followed the convoy of vehicles all the way back to Israeli lines.

Circumstances prevented the Ya’mas from fulfilling the Shin Bet’s demand that Ayda be captured and not killed; he died from his wounds at an Israeli aid station.

The Ya’mas would be back in Gaza again later that night—a different target and a different mission in the hunt for fugitives. But the Palestinians would be waiting. The Gaza Strip was quickly escalating into the Ground Zero of the intifada. Israeli counterterrorist efforts inside the West Bank and Jerusalem, together with the construction of the Separation Barrier, were strangling Palestinian efforts to set Israel ablaze.