A Bloody Separation
At just after midnight on May 11, 2004, the Giva’ati Brigade dispatched a small force of reconnaissance infantrymen and combat engineers into Zaitun, a dangerous patchwork of overcrowded streets and alleys at the western fringe of Beit Hanoun, near the Israeli frontier, to destroy a weapons shop that was producing Qassam rockets, which had been launched against civilian targets in southern Israel. The force, led by a D9 and supported by Merkava tanks, came under incessant machine gun and RPG fire the moment it crossed into Palestinian territory; Israeli soldiers returned fire, launching .50-caliber machine gun bursts from inside armored booths, complete with bullet- and blast-resistant glass, affixed atop their armored vehicles. Saguy Bashan, a reporter for Israel’s Channel Two news, and a cameraman accompanied the young soldiers, most of them under the age of twenty, into battle. The men, their faces painted with black streaks of camouflage paint for the night’s fight, seemed relaxed and at ease. They relayed their status calmly as the RPGs flew only a few feet off target.
The force reached their objective under the darkened night that had been interrupted by the flashes of gunfire. The combat engineers wired with explosives a machine shop and six heavy lathes that were used to manufacture indigenous Qassam rockets. As the black sky turned a soft shade of blue, hinting at the coming dawn, the building disappeared in a flash of fire and a plume of smoke and rubble. Lieutenant Colonel Ofer Vinter, the operation commander, gave the order to withdraw.
The convoy of dozers and armored personnel carriers pushed out of Zaitun as fast as it could, though the streets were now filled with people. Children threw rocks at the Israeli vehicles, and gunmen fired wildly. It was difficult for the young soldiers to maintain a singular column amid so many people. Some vehicles were cut off, out of sight to the other tanks and dozers in the column; others were diverted by the crowds. One M113 was knocked out of service by a powerful roadside IED. The vehicle was torn apart like a twisted soda can, but miraculously all of the soldiers inside were accounted for and unharmed. Seconds later, a second M113 disappeared inside a deadly plume of black smoke. A powerful IED, perhaps containing as much as one hundred kilograms of explosives, destroyed the armored vehicle and killed the six soldiers on board. All that was left of the APC was its discarded engine block.
The street soon flooded with people, some wearing the black headbands of the PIJ, who raced into the street to try to steal what was left of some of the mangled bodies. Women stomped on the lifeless mounds of bloodied and charred flesh in ghoulish displays. It was absolutely medieval.
Lieutenant Colonel Vinter ordered his infantrymen out of the vehicles and into several apartment buildings, where they seized the high ground. The battle for the bodies of the fallen soldiers would go on all day and be one of the most ferocious of the intifada. By nightfall the Giva’ati force had left Zaitun with the remains of the dead, sealed in plastic bags, carefully transported back to Israel for burial.
It had been a horrible day in Gaza. It had been a horrible and bloody year.
—
Chief Superintendent Yehonatan was hunkered down and under fire when the Giva’ati Brigade APC disintegrated twenty miles away in Zaitun. A small operation with another Giva’ati unit, searching for tunnels under the Philadelphi Corridor had turned into a full-fledged battle, and Yehonatan coordinated a dozen moving parts of the developing firefight. Palestinian RPG teams were everywhere. Palestinian snipers and machine gun crews peppered the rooftops with sustained fire in the hope of hitting Ya’mas sniper teams, while IEDs, some planted by children forced at gunpoint to enter the no-man’s-land, were laid across roadways and alongside buildings. The children turned every mission into a moral dilemma. “Once, one of our men saw a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old placing an IED near our position. He had the boy in his sights but didn’t fire. It was his personal decision and he chose to let the kid run away and deal with the device later.”1
The Giva’ati soldiers were children, too, Yehonatan thought. One of the operators, one of the veterans, went on the radio to ask if any of the names of the dead had been released. The Ya’mas had worked with every unit in the Giva’ati Brigade, in every corner of the Strip, and the operators wanted to know if anyone they knew was among the dead. It was doubtful that anyone would recognize a name. It was the faces of these young soldiers that would be remembered, faces at nighttime briefings, faces covered by green-and-black camouflage paint. The young soldiers did not wear name tags. They were simply called Ahi (“brother”) when seen at the PX, at the dining hall, or in front of an apartment block in Rafah under fire.
When daylight emerged, the decision was made to pull out the task force. The operation commander contacted Yehonatan and told him to assemble his men—the armored vehicles would be waiting, at a junction known by a coded designation on a map, to pick up the undercover forces. No one was in the mood to sit inside an armored vehicle given what had happened in Zaitun. Bullets were better than bombs, the undercovers felt. Apprehensively, they entered the M113s and the modified tanks for the ride back to Israel. Bullets and RPGs followed their trail all the way back to Israeli lines.
The Ya’mas base, located near division headquarters, felt like a fortress under siege. Everyone—even the young soldiers guarding the entrance—appeared to be on a war footing. The percussion-like thuds of rotor blades beat a cadence off to the distance. Ambulances were everywhere. Television news crews parked at the side of the road, ready for the evening news. Yehonatan ordered his men to the briefing room where the post-mission analysis was held. The men were covered in a thin, almost silk-like caking of Rafah dust. Their throats were parched, but still they preferred nicotine and caffeine to water.
The briefing was detailed and pointed. The operation was analyzed, and each operator that engaged a threat had to explain the why, the where, and the what. The post-mission analysis always lasted longer than planned, even on dire days of loss like this and even when the men were starving and in desperate need of sleep. Before the assembly broke up, there was some discussion of a few missions that were being planned—an arrest in Khan Yunis, a raid in Jebalya—and tomorrow’s assignment: to serve as a brigade emergency response force for a combat engineer tunnel-locating unit working the Philadelphi Route. The combat engineers, demolition specialists from a unit whose acronym spelled out Yahalom, or Diamond, in Hebrew, had done a lot of work with the Ya’mas along the Egyptian frontier. The soldiers were so young and, after serving in the Strip, so full of combat experience. The unit’s commander, Captain Aviv Hakani, had become friends with many of the Ya’mas officers, especially Chief Inspector Yaron, who respected the courage and doggedness of the young officer from Ashdod, forty miles away. Yaron had led more Grass Widow operations than he could remember in support of these intrepid burrowers.2
When the briefing ended, Yehonatan dismissed his men and ordered them to eat; they didn’t have to be told to take care of their gear and ready everything for tomorrow’s muster. Yehonatan stepped outside, his eyes squinting from the harsh sun, and realized that he needed a few hours at home. This was the quiet before the inevitable eruption, and Yehonatan wanted a few hours at home. There were moments when only the embrace of a wife and the sweet smile of a child could erase the fear and blood of Gaza from one’s peripheral memory. Yehonatan knew that the unit would be in good hands. Shimon, his deputy, was as good as they came. Yaron, the team leader, was one of the best officers in Israel’s counterterrorist community. The sun was setting by the time Yehonatan finished his paperwork, his meetings with Shin Bet commanders, and a few meetings with various IDF officers and intelligence personnel. He hoped to make it home by dinner and to have the chance to read a bedtime story to his young child. There would still be no escaping Gaza. The names of the fallen would be released on the evening news.
—
The command of a Ya’mas unit—the command of any operational unit for that matter—carried with it unimaginable burdens of responsibility that few mortals could bear. The commander was responsible for making sure his men made it home alive and in one piece; this was the fabric of the commander’s existence, it was a sacrosanct responsibility. Commanders made sure that every facet of a mission, even those daring behind-enemy-lines forays, were as safe as they could be; the planning, preparation, and execution were always done with bringing the boys home alive in mind. Unit commanders tangled with generals; they fought with quartermasters and with bean counters. Part of the job of keeping the men safe was to make sure that they had the best weapons and equipment possible. Unit commanders, and their direct subordinates, the team leaders and the intelligence and operations officers, worked around the clock to take care of all the small nuances of life inside a high-octane unit whose daily grind consisted of secret missions behind enemy lines. The commander and his staff worried about the food that the men ate, and the beds in which they slept; in the Gaza unit, when it was discovered that some operators, new immigrants from the former Soviet Union, were in financial hardship, the officers assembled cash to furnish their apartments and to make sure that their families were looked after. The commander and the officers were the last ones to go to bed and they were always up before anyone else.
It was impossible to escape the pressure of Gaza and the encumbrance of being in charge. When Yehonatan closed his eyes, he saw the images from the UAVs while inside a Command Post, watching his men take incoming RPGs. He couldn’t wash the stench of poverty out of his senses, nor could he extinguish the fear of being mistaken for Palestinian snipers by trigger-happy and terrified-out-of-their-wits soldiers who only ten months earlier where still in high school. Being home could not expunge seconds dragging into hours as the force waited for extraction. In Gaza it was all about being pulled out to safety.
On the morning of May 12, Yehonatan had the chance to wake up in a comfortable bed and prepare breakfast for his wife and child. Instinctively, he checked his pager every few minutes. There were no urgent messages from Gaza. It was a brilliant spring day. May was certainly the most splendid month in Israel—cool enough for a light jacket at night and warm enough during the day that the sun could gently toast your face. Yehonatan was going to take the little one out of nursery school early for a few hours at the playground.
Ninety minutes away—give or take the always maddening Israeli traffic—Vlad was peering through the sights of his M4, awaiting the order to fire, before throwing some lead downrange on an impromptu training ground set up near the frontier next to Rafah. The unit was on call, a standby emergency response force of sorts, for Captain Aviv Khakani’s tunnel hunting unit, which was set to respond to intelligence that Hamas, borrowing First World War tactics, was planning to burrow underneath the Termit (“Thermal”) Fortification.3 The Termit Fortification on the Philadelphi route consisted of an armored observation post built atop the frame of a three-story building buttressed by dirt, sandbags, steel, and mesh. Termit was a punching bag. It had been hit before by suicide bombers and incessant RPG and mortar fire—Israeli commentators called the fortification the most dangerous place on the planet.4
Captain Khakani told Yaron and Vlad that he was just going to go inside the suspected area to have a look and that he would summon the Ya’mas if they were needed. The ad hoc range, a desert clearing with a natural sand berm, was three kilometers from the staging area. Vlad and his fellow operators fired their pistols and M4s as the May sun showed hints of fading into the Mediterranean.
At just after 1700, Captain Khakani and his crew of four sergeants set out inside their M113 equipped with nearly a ton of explosives, robotics, rappelling gear, and other underground sensors. The D9 plowed ahead. Khakani and his men followed close behind. The operation was routine.
Vlad and his squad were cleaning up their brass from the desert floor when the earth shook violently beneath them. The explosion was like nothing they had ever heard before. The operators wearing their radios raised the volume and scanned the emergency frequencies; they looked at one another in a state of damning resignation. Their fears were confirmed seconds later when they heard an ominous radio burst from a bewildered soldier stationed at the Termit observation post: “The APC just vanished!”5
—
It had been a blissful day, Yehonatan thought as he pushed the swing in a playground that was a universe away from Gaza. And then his mobile phone rang. The division operations officer called, his voice frayed by the stress, demanding that Yehonatan return to Gaza immediately—there had been a tragedy and the unit was needed for a vital operation. The burden of command gushed with the adrenaline that raced through Yehonatan’s system. Yehonatan pushed his daughter on the swings one last time and then tried, as best as he could, to tell her that he had to leave immediately. He dropped to one knee and looked at her. His heart sank deep below his chest as he told her that he had to rush back to work. With his wife still at work, he scrambled to find a neighbor who could look after his little girl. Gaza had once again shattered normalcy.
The drive back to Gaza should have taken two hours, even with lights and sirens. Yehonatan made it back in half that time. He maneuvered his Border Guard take-home vehicle, a Toyota pickup, in and out of all obstacles on the highways heading south. Darkness neared as the traffic quickly changed from civilian to military once he entered the grasps of the Strip’s outer roadways. Helicopters hovered overhead. Tank transporters were clogging up the lanes heading toward Rafah. Yehonatan looked back into his rearview mirror and saw a small convoy of ambulances, as well. It was still too early, he realized, for the parents of the dead to have been notified.
Imad,* the unit operations officer, updated Yehonatan throughout his Formula One scurry back to Gaza. Imad, a Druze officer who was known as one of the calmest men in the unit in a tight spot, cooly relayed updates to the unit commander. It was hard to hear the story on the phone. The tunnel hunting M113 had taken a direct hit from an RPG fired by a PIJ team that had used a play area in between two buildings for cover. Even with Israeli upgrades to the original American design, the Soviet-era antitank rocket had little difficulty in penetrating the M113’s aluminum armor cover, resulting in the one ton of military-grade high explosives detonating in a thunderous blast felt miles away. The vehicle evaporated into a mushroom cloud of dust and debris. Captain Khakani and his crew could not have survived the fiery fulmination.
Yehonatan ordered the entire unit, all hands, to assemble at headquarters and then deploy to the Southern Brigade. Everyone was to bring extra provisions, especially ammunition; the unit’s tactical medics prepared for casualties.
Gaza’s Southern Brigade commander was a veteran paratroop officer who had seen his share of combat as a young officer in southern Lebanon, but he was wearing the destruction of two APCs, less than forty-eight hours apart, on his face. The colonel took Yehonatan aside and told him that the Ya’mas was the only unit that had the skills and experience to operate on foot inside Rafah and that the unit was to enter the city near the site of the blast and sift through the sands to find fragments of flesh and bone from the fallen men. Armored units and helicopter gunships attempted to keep Palestinian gunmen from raiding the blast crater. Yehonatan readied officers and men. He was daunted, almost disturbed, by their lack of fear or personal concern. All of Rafah knew what was coming. The terrorist groups knew that the Israelis would make an effort to locate the remnants of those killed. The battle was going to be like nothing any of the operators had ever seen before, but yet the men were determined—anxious—to go in and get the job done; they didn’t want to wait until daylight. They wanted in, now. Yehonatan worried that they had become too used to the combat, too used to the thrill, the danger, or even the fact that no one had been hurt, to feel fear anymore.6
Throughout the night, a small army readied to enter Rafah. Yehonatan handled his men. The Giva’ati commander made sure that his force, elements from the brigade’s engineering battalion, were ready, as well; the engineers would handle the Grass Widow piece of the operation, taking over buildings that overlooked the area where the M113 had been destroyed so that Yehonatan’s men could work unencumbered by Palestinian snipers and gunmen. Each and every Ya’mas operator was handed a plastic food bag that had been emptied so that the men could fill them with bones and shards of flesh. Yehonatan thought of his wife and child back at home, back in a different universe.
—
The force set out before dawn. The Ya’mas might have been the special operations unit in Gaza, but the D9 was king. The D9s, armored to withstand the most ambitious IED and repetitive RPG strikes, plowed a 4.5-meter-wide path on any surface, from dirt to asphalt; the behemoth’s blade dug into the turf to disrupt and destroy any explosive booby traps. The Merkava tanks and the M113s with the engineers followed close behind. Yehonatan wouldn’t let his men inside the M113. He had two of the more heavily armored Achzarit APCs at his disposal.
The Giva’ati combat engineers quickly took over the homes that overlooked the scene of the blast. The soldiers rustled up the families into a central room and then the snipers went to work. Even with such a show of force on such a sensitive mission, the Palestinians still held the numerical advantage. Hundreds of gunmen were determined to make the most of the Israelis at their most exposed and vulnerable. But the Israelis held the optics, and the precision fire was holding the line temporarily.
One by one, the Ya’mas operators emerged from the bellies of the two Achzarit APCs and dropped to their hands and knees. They saw the huge hole where the M113 had been destroyed, and they carefully sifted through the thin sand, looking for anything. “We were like mice crawling through a maze,” Yaron would comment, “but we had to bring something back for the families to bury, even if it was a bone fragment.”7 The Palestinian fire, including RPGs and heavy machine guns fired at great range, intensified, it appeared, with each passing minute, but the operators did not stop what they were doing. “We knew Captain Khakani very well,” Yehonatan stated, “we had worked with him on countless operations. We respected him and we cared for him. He was, in many ways, one of us. The gunfire could be dealt with, but picking up the pieces was something that we viewed as a holy mission.”8
The search was grueling, time-consuming. The men, officers and newcomers alike, sank their hands deep into the dirt and then looked at the dusty remnants left in their hands, hoping to find something. The weight carried by each man, loads of ammunition worn under heavy body armor fastened tightly, was hard enough on a cool summer’s night but constraining and dehydrating under the day’s full sun. Sweat poured down under helmets and balaclavas, as eyes were burned by the salt of unstoppable perspiration. The pings of bullets hitting nearby wasn’t as bothersome as the surreal feel of the assignment and the surroundings.
Ya’mas operators moved in and out of courtyards and buildings to peer around corners and provide covering fire for the men on the ground. The incoming fire was incessant. Yehonatan ordered the D9s to plow small berms, high enough to cover a man on his knees, along each stretch of street the men searched. The D9s also raised their blades and were placed in between streets, so that the Ya’mas search teams could race across without getting hit.
Slowly, the main pieces of the M113 were found near the blast site. The armored chassis had disintegrated with such force that the only bits remaining were no larger than a credit card. A few bits of bloody flesh were painstakingly handled and placed inside the plastic sacks. Bone splinters, small, that looked like they came from a small bird were also found. Yaron managed to locate the dog tags belonging to First Sergeant Lior Vishinsky;9 Vishinsky’s dad, Shlomo, was a popular theater and television actor.
There was no break from the grind, even though the men were hungry and dehydrated. The Palestinian sniper fire intensified.
—
The men on their knees, along with the operators who covered their crawl, focused solely on the carpet of sand before them. No one paid attention to the thumping of attack helicopters overhead and the engines of the heavy armor being fired up to move here or there. The classic undercover operation was small, a deft footprint; Gaza was somewhat larger. Here, the men were part of a full army.
As the afternoon threatened to turn into evening, an urgent call for help came over the Giva’ati frequency. An infantryman in one of the two Grass Widows had walked with an old woman near a terrace in order to help her get to the bathroom. The trip to the lavatory was intentional. The family knew that Palestinian snipers would be searching the open spaces. The soldier, showing inexperience in dealing with the intricacies of a Grass Widow, had taken a shot to the neck and was bleeding out. Another infantryman was also hit, and severely wounded. The young officer in charge was in an awful state; the threads of shell shock were heard in his brief and frantic transmissions, and the medical condition of the wounded was unclear. The unit’s company commander, back at the CP, indicated that he was going in to get his men out.
Thunderous fire rained on their exposed position. The Palestinians had laid their trap.
—
Behind the walls, just out of sight of the Palestinian gunners, the Giva’ati rescue force entered the fight. The Giva’ati engineers were transported on Nag’machon armored personnel carriers. The Nag’machon, a typical Israeli by-product of surplus that could still be salvaged and new technologies that could be added on, was a hybrid of an armored fighting vehicle made from the chassis of the British-made Centurion Main Battle Tank; some of the vehicles were even fitted with add-on turrets, juxtaposed on top of the vehicle, for visibility and protection. Unlike the thin-skinned M113, the Nag’machon was equipped with reactive armor blocks that detonated upon impact to destroy the penetrating capabilities of an RPG, and they had thick cubes of transparent armor so that gunners inside could fire back at any threat; mesh armor, steel fencing, ringed the turret to stop RPGs and antitank missiles from hitting the vehicle. But the Nag’machon did not have a rear entry hatch. The moment the Giva’ati combat engineers made it to the location of the Grass Widow and the soldiers emerged, they were also hit by Palestinian sniper fire. It was what Yehonatan had feared all along. Now there were two Giva’ati soldiers killed in the operation, and several more were wounded. The situation deteriorated rapidly.
The two armored personnel carriers at Yehonatan’s disposal, the Achzarits, had a rear ramp that could be lowered into the besieged house. Yehonatan switched over to divisional radio and requested that he be given command of the sector to oversee the rescue of the Giva’ati force. Permission was immediately granted. Yehonatan had never directed a full-scale operation with armor, artillery, mechanized forces, and heavy engineering equipment before. His specialty was small-unit penetration and top-secret strikes with a handful of men watching his back.
A mission to retrieve pieces of the dead had developed into a full-scale nightmare. The operation was now a mission to rescue those who still had a fighting chance. Two Achzarit APCs set out toward the Grass Widow. Yaron and Yehonatan were in the lead vehicle.
—
There were members of the Gaza Ya’mas unit who had been at war since the unit’s first day in the field. They had seen a lot in fifteen years inside danger, and they had found themselves under permanent fire. Other members of the unit, some who had served in Lebanon during their army days, and who had served in Gaza at the height of al-Aqsa, had never encountered gunfire like the type encountered on this Wednesday afternoon. Hundreds of Palestinian gunmen representing all of the terror factions had now focused on a complex of homes where Israeli soldiers were trapped. Some newcomers to the unit used to scoff at Yaron and his insistence that everyone sit down and watch the film Black Hawk Down from start to finish and take away something from the story of the U.S. Special Forces operation that was bogged down inside interminable violence. But this was the real deal, some would later comment; this was their moment surrounded on all sides by an endless stream of fire.
The Ya’mas mission to find body parts continued; nearly half the unit remained on their hands and knees under the hot son. But Yehonatan directed other members of the unit toward positions to provide cover fire for the Ya’mas rescue force that Yaron was leading toward the beleaguered Giva’ati infantrymen. A small team of Ya’mas operators rushed to the besieged home on foot, to help stabilize the Grass Widow and to calm the men down. The Ya’mas paramedics carried small emergency room triage centers on their backs. Yaron and his small force rushed to their vehicles. They had approximately a thousand meters to traverse in order to reach the soldiers—a thousand meters of treacherous corners, blind spots, one-family homes, and open ground. There was no time to call in a D9 to clear out the safety strip. Yaron ordered the two hulking APCs to charge forward into the fire. Yehonatan feared that his men would be hit by hidden devices.
There were IEDs everywhere in Rafah, especially among the homes that straddled Philadelphi. Yaron felt what must have been thousands of 7.62mm rounds pinging off his lead vehicle; the massive explosions thundering outside were like mighty fists jabbing the sides. Yaron lifted one of the hatches to peer out for a second just to make sure that the vehicles were not straying off course. The aerial maps and photographs were clear and pinpoint, but the chaos and confusion was quite the opposite. “I know that I wasn’t supposed to stick my head out and look outside,” Yaron reflected, “but I just wanted to make sure that we got there.”10 Yaron informed the Giva’ati position that his APCs were two minutes out.
The two Achzarits positioned themselves so that they could back into the home. The clash of concrete and armored steel created a tumbling crash, as the rear ramps dropped into the living room and out of the line of fire. The dead and seriously wounded were evacuated in the Giva’ati APC. Ya’mas paramedics tended to the others who were hurt. The Giva’ati officers were surprised, relieved, by the composure of the Ya’mas rescuers. They were calm and they called out threats before identifying which targets they would engage.
The Achzarit had a crew of three and was designed to carry seven fully equipped soldiers in and out of battle. Together with the Ya’mas operators, each vehicle now had to cram twenty-five men inside its belly for the ride back to safety. Men were lying on top of one another, helmets battered into legs. Yaron attempted to calm the soldiers and reassure them that they were all right. It took less than an hour for the Israeli forces to return back to the safety of Israeli lines, but it seemed like it took days. Combat medics rushed the wounded to the heliport, where UH-60 Black Hawks, known as Owls in the IAF lexicon of nicknames, would fly them to Soroka Medical Center. Military rabbis attended to the dead, and the body slivers that the Ya’mas had collected.
There were still a few hours of daylight left. The Ya’mas returned to the blast zone for a few more hours of the painstaking work of searching for body fragments. The unit stayed on its knees and under fire for the next two days.
—
Hamas commanders took notice of the massive Israeli effort to retrieve the thread-like shards of their fallen’s flesh. They witnessed the political risk taken by the military commanders to carry out so risky a mission just so that a nation could help the families of the dead cope with their loss. The Israelis’ display, on their hands and knees amid the bullets and RPGs, impressed Hamas military commanders, especially the new heir apparent, Ahmed Jabari, who saw great virtue and great opportunity in this window of Israeli sense and sensibility. If the Israelis were to go to such efforts for dead soldiers, Jabari must have thought to himself, imagine what they would do, imagine what they would forfeit, for a live one. Hamas planners went to work.
Captain Khakani and his four men were laid to rest four days after their APC evaporated into a cloud of destruction along the Philadelphi Route. The funerals took place the day after 150,000 protestors gathered in Tel Aviv to demand that Israel withdraw—once and for all—from the Gaza Strip.
Less than forty-eight hours after the funerals, after the prayers for the dead, the IDF launched Operation Rainbow, a massive weeklong offensive against terrorist targets throughout the Gaza Strip; some three hundred homes along the smuggling route of Rafah were destroyed. It would be a last effort—for the status quo. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a man known to never buckle, realized that Israel’s stance in Gaza was untenable. There were rumors of unilateral Israeli disengagement. In June 2004 the rumors became a statement of intent. Israel would unilaterally remove the settlements (all twenty-one of them), the settlers, and its military forces from the Gaza Strip by fall 2005. The intifada was waning. It was time for the killing to stop.
There would be parting shots, Chief Superintendent Yehonatan knew. The men of the Gaza Ya’mas had been at war for a long time. Until they were told otherwise, it was simply business as usual. Yehonatan and his men continued operating inside the Strip—the arrest operations, the targeted killings, and the deniable special operations on behalf of the highest levels of Israeli intelligence continued. Late at night on June 2, 2004, a Ya’mas team spearheaded a tunnel-hunting operation by the 1st Golani Infantry Brigade inside Kishta, one of Rafah’s most dangerous neighborhoods. The team searched inside homes, in gardens, and underneath vehicles, until they discovered a large tunnel, responsible for the smuggling of explosives and weapons.
The extraordinary was simply part of the routine.
—
Unlike many of his contemporaries serving on the General Staff, Major General Dan Harel’s CV was not filled with a career full of service in special operations. Harel was a gunner, an artilleryman, and his combat experience was in Lebanon supporting Israel’s special operations forces as they waged a bitterly fought campaign against Hezbollah. Harel knew how difficult counterterrorism warfare was; Gaza was no different than Lebanon, Harel would learn. This form of warfare was exhausting and bloody. It was the type of warfare in which defeat or victory hinged on the action of small bands of men with boundless courage and endless resolve.
Harel arrived in Gaza in 2003, just as the intifada in Gaza was shifting from small-scale encounters to full-blown combat. His front was the most explosive of the entire intifada, and the costliest in terms of Israeli casualties. His front was also the only one that Israel unilaterally walked away from. In August 2005, Harel commanded the pullout, the disengagement, from the Gaza Strip.
The very best units in the Israeli military carried out counterterrorist operations inside Gaza during General Harel’s tenure at Southern Command, and some of the work they did—missions coined by one insider as super top-secret—were worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster. But of all the units that worked inside the fences, the Ya’mas stood out above all. Week in and week out reports came across Harel’s desk detailing missions of great daring and extraordinary feats of courage. Since the effort was collective, it was impossible for Harel to pinpoint individuals for their heroism and dedication under fire, so General Harel decided to decorate the entire unit.
In 2005, the Gaza Ya’mas received a unit citation. In a ceremony where the news photographers were warned they couldn’t publish the faces of the men in the room wearing the Border Guard green beret, Chief Superintendent Yehonatan received the award on behalf of his men.
Ostensibly, the award was for the bloody May in Rafah in 2004 and the rescue of the trapped Giva’ati soldiers. A senior IDF officer said, of that operation, “The operators displayed amazing courage entering the crowded Palestinian neighborhood despite the fire that was directed at them at the entrance to the house. The operation will be remembered and not only in the unit’s combat log. There’s good reason why they are embraced by the IDF and the security forces. They are humble operators that are considered the iron fist in the Strip.”11
One operation, though, could not define the unit’s legacy during the bitterly fought five-year campaign. The commendation issued to the Gaza Ya’mas was for a long list of heroic actions and for the redefinition and expansion of the unit’s size and capabilities while at war. The decoration was for an endless number of remarkable moments of unit audacity, courage under fire, and playing so pivotal a role in the war against terror during the al-Aqsa intifada. During the conflict, the unit neutralized more than one hundred terrorists; many of those were killed in direct battles with the Ya’mas; others were killed while launching attacks against Israeli targets. The unit spearheaded the discovery and destruction of twenty tunnels. The Gaza Ya’mas unit captured arsenals full of AK-47s, RPKs, and RPGs, and seized enough explosives and ammunition to equip an army. The Ya’mas apprehended almost five hundred wanted terror suspects who hid in plain sight inside areas where the very best of Israel’s special operations arsenal often feared to tread.12
The Gaza Ya’mas brought guerrilla warfare to the doorstep of those who were the grand masters of asymmetrical terror. They did so as scalpels, sharp and precise, and as absolute professionals—with great planning and incredible luck, the Ya’mas did not suffer a killed in action, or a serious injury, during its sixteen years inside Gaza and the five years of the intifada. This is a remarkable accomplishment for those who were in command, as well as for those who ventured deep into the darkness night after night.
The Ya’mas forced the Palestinian terror factions to abandon their strategy of crossing the wire, making them resort to tactics that were underground or launched over the horizon. The Gaza Ya’mas unit played a pivotal role in containing a wave of seemingly unstoppable violence that, as horrific as it was, could have been so very much worse. The small, rarely talked about unit of undercover operators turned commandos in Gaza made a monumental difference. Few units in the history of Israel’s wars have ever had finer hours.