No Mission Is Impossible (27 page)

It was three-forty. Now they began moving closer to the ship, which was growing increasingly visible. The Israeli force raised its speed and came within very close range, almost next to it. Shaul Mofaz asked again for clear confirmation. “That's the ship! That's the ship!” came the answer from below.

The moment of decision was approaching. All the senior officers on the Boeing remained glued to their monitors, where they could follow the takeover from start to finish; the process looked like a Hollywood thriller.

At four the electronic signal flashed through the flotilla receivers. That was the go-ahead for Noah's Ark, which began at once. From above, the officers in the Boeing could see the Shayetet fighters bursting from the sea and air onto the
Karine A
deck, surprising the thirteen-member crew, the majority of whom were asleep. They could make out that no gun battle was taking place on the ship, and could identify the Shayetet commanders conducting a preliminary search for the weapons. Most
important of all, and unbelievably, the entire operation lasted just seven minutes.

A sigh of relief could be heard aboard the Boeing, and Chief of Staff Mofaz hurried to call the officers below. He congratulated them without concealing his happiness: “You did wonderful work! From above, it looked amazing. What now? What's the next stage?”

“We've completed the takeover, and our forces are doing a sweep,” Shayetet Colonel Ram Rotenberg responded.

“Are you seeing anything yet?” Mofaz persisted, seeking a smoking gun, weaponry that would prove to the world—and to the United States in particular—that Yasser Arafat was engaged in smuggling Iranian arms into the Palestinian territories.

“Not yet—right now we're going down into the holds. We'll report back the moment we find something,” the commander replied.

Chiney, who in the meantime had boarded the ship, rushed to the cargo hold with the Shayetet commander. With flashlights, they illuminated the area but couldn't find a thing. A few minutes went by, but the search bore no fruit. They saw nothing but bags of rice, bundles of clothes and children's toys. “We can't see anything, not a weapon and not a mortar,” one of the searchers blurted out in despair. For a moment, an appalling doubt stole into their hearts: Had they captured the right ship? Was Noah's Ark a failure? Had they risked their lives for nothing?

And then came the turning point. A quick, rough interrogation of the ship's captain, Omar Akawi, an employee of the Palestinian transportation ministry, yielded results. A commando fighter considered the Shayetet tough guy began shaking him with no excessive gentleness, and the confession wasn't long in coming. “It's in the forward hold,” Akawi ultimately blurted.

The commandos hurried to the bow. “We initially thought that we hadn't found anything,” Lieutenant Colonel G recalled. “But we discovered the first crate, then the second, and a sense of great pride overwhelmed us. It was the first time we encountered such quantities of weapons. Every Katyusha launcher that was uncovered was accompanied by a round of applause, and the guys greatly rejoiced.”

The soldiers took over the vessel commands and the ship was turned toward the Gulf of Eilat. One of the commandos ran to his officer. “We need to raise the Israeli flag,” he said.

“But we don't have one,” the officer countered.

“We do. I brought it from home,” the commando said.

A few hours later, an Israeli flag flowing from its mast,
Karine A
docked in Eilat. The methodical search revealed that the ship had been loaded with sixty-four tons of weaponry, including Katyusha rockets, Sagger anti-tank missiles, Israeli-made mortars (that had been supplied to Iran before Khomeini's takeover), rocket-propelled grenade launchers, Ra'ad missiles, various kinds of rifles and land mines. “All this was an internal Iranian affair,” a senior officer joked, “their Iranians were beaten by our Iranians, Mofaz and Halutz [both officers of Iranian origin].”

The day after the operation, Prime Minister Sharon hosted American General Anthony Zinni at his farm. At the end of the meeting, he told him, “You can tell Yasser Arafat, when you see him today, that he needn't worry about his weapons ship, the
Karine A.
We got it, and it's in our hands.”

A
fter the story went public, the United States cut its ties with the Palestinian Authority for an extended period. President Bush was furious that Arafat had lied to him, and that was one of the reasons the Americans would soon give their approval to Operation Defensive Shield.

   
SHAUL MOFAZ, THEN IDF'S CHIEF OF STAFF, LATER MINISTER OF DEFENSE

          
“The story of the
Karine A,
beyond the smuggling of fifty tons of weapons and terror supplies from Iran to the Palestinians, is about the agreement between them, according to which the Palestinians, in exchange for the weapons they received, would give the Iranians a foothold within the Palestinian Authority. Its significance was the entry of Iran's Revolutionary Guards into the cities of the West Bank.

              
“When we received the intelligence about this, it was clear
that we needed to take control of the ship in order to capture the weaponry and—no less important—to expose Arafat's true face as a terror leader to the world.

              
“After the Shayetet and the air force's amazing operation, Prime Minister Arik Sharon decided to send me to the White House to present Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, with all the intelligence that we'd acquired and to reveal the deal reached between Arafat and the Iranians. She looked over the material, astonished, and ran with it to President Bush. She asked if I could stay in Washington; I said that I could not because the Intifada was at its worst. This material led to President Bush's famous declaration that the Palestinian Authority is a terror organization.

              
“The central dilemma during the operation had been conclusively identifying the ship. The fear was that if we couldn't identify it with one hundred percent certainty, we might mistakenly capture another country's ship, something that could cause great trouble. Consequently, when I boarded the Boeing command post, the first thing I asked for was to see the ship's identification on the radar.”

In 1993, Israel and the PLO have signed the Oslo Accords, hoping to reach a peace solution soon. Unfortunately, the accords fail and a new wave of terrorism sweeps Israel. After a stunning increase in suicide bombings by Palestinians, Prime Minister Sharon and Defense Minister Benyamin Ben Eliezer launch a large-scale operation in the West Bank, targeting the terrorist organizations. The operation is directed by Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz.

O
n the rainy, stormy night of March 29, 2002, an IDF force entered Ramallah, the capital of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. The troops' raid on his headquarters, the Mukataa, was carried out on foot, and wasn't met by particularly intense Palestinian resistance. Avi Peled, the commander of the Egoz Commando Unit, later remarked, “We knew that, for the Palestinians, the Mukataa was the end of the line, the holy of holies. We were sure that they would fight us till the last bullet. But apparently our entrance into the Mukataa and the Palestinian Preventive Security headquarters in Beitunia had broken them psychologically, and their resistance collapsed everywhere.”

That was the start of Operation Defensive Shield, one of the IDF's largest-ever operations in the West Bank, territories also referred to by Israelis as Judea and Samaria. The goal was to strike at the area's terrorist organizations and to stop a wave of terror attacks that had reached unprecedented numbers. During the preceding month, referred to as
Black March, 135 Israelis had been killed by terror attacks, eleven of them suicide bombings within Israel's pre-1967 borders. The low point was a terrorist attack on a Passover seder in the Park Hotel, in Netanya: a suicide bomber entered the hotel undetected and killed thirty guests and wounded 140 others celebrating around the Passover table.

The horrifying images broadcast in Israel and around the world that night melted American objections to an Israeli military response. The next day, the government authorized Operation Defensive Shield and mobilized thirty thousand reservists. Called up for the operation were the Golani, Nahal, Yiftach and paratrooper brigades, as well as both regular soldiers and reservists in the infantry, armored and engineering corps. At the Knesset, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon explained the goals of the operation: “The IDF's soldiers and their commanders will go into cities and villages that have become shelters for terrorists, to capture and detain terrorists and, above all, those who dispatch them, to seize and confiscate weapons and fighting supplies intended to hit Israel, and to uncover and wipe out terror installations, terror laboratories, weapons-creation factories and hideouts.”

In Ramallah. the IDF demolished the buildings of the Mukataa compound, except for the structure that housed Arafat himself. Fighters from the Egoz commando took positions in rooms along the corridor leading to Arafat's office, while outside, Israeli tanks encircled the site. Sheltered within the Mukataa's detention center were several fugitive criminals involved in terror activities against Israel. The head of Palestinian intelligence had ordered them clandestinely brought into Arafat's compound, under the assumption that they would be safe there from the IDF. After a lengthy standoff, the Americans had intervened, and the fugitives were transferred to a prison in Jericho under British oversight.

In Ramallah, the IDF had uncovered weapons labs and captured scores of fugitive men and materiel. Toward the end of the fighting, it had seized Marwan Barghouti, the commander of the Fatah armed faction, the Tanzim; Barghouti would be later sentenced to life in prison for his numerous terror attacks.

The siege in Ramallah.
(Yoav Guterman, GPO)

From Ramallah, on to Nablus. Nablus was considered a stronghold of Palestinian resistance, and its Qasbah, a maze of narrow, tortuous streets and convoluted passages had become a source of dread for the IDF's General Staff, which was deeply concerned with the risks of fighting there. Densely populated, the Qasbah contained booby-trapped homes, sniper positions and a great number of terrorists. Hundreds of them hid in the crooked alleys, IEDs were planted everywhere and gas containers were buried in the ground, ready to explode. The IDF elite soldiers braced themselves before approaching the Qasbah, expecting bloody surprises at every street corner.

The assault on Nablus began on April 5, with the operation under the command of Brigadier General Yitzhak (”Jerry”) Gershon, chief of the Judea and Samaria Division. He orchestrated the movements of the paratrooper brigade, which came from the west; Golani, which approached from the south, and the armored Yiftach Brigade, which occupied the eastern part of the city, including its hostile refugee camps. The Palestinians had planted dozens of mines within delivery trucks
and water tanks lining the roadways, and IDF engineers systematically defused them, one by one.

The paratroopers attacked the Qasbah from all sides simultaneously. Their secret weapon was a revolutionary battle method: passing through walls. The paratroopers had developed various instruments allowing them to break walls with heavy sledgehammers or blow large holes in them and thus move from one house to another without even stepping into the murderous streets. That method had been used for the first time a month and a half earlier, during the seizure of the nearby Balata refugee camp. Aviv Kochavi, the commander of the paratrooper brigade, explained that, “in the crowded Qasbah, where the narrow streets contained numerous mines and obstacles, and where snipers could shoot from every corner, we developed an alternative system of fighting: we moved exclusively through the walls and buildings to surprise the enemy, who alone was left to circulate in the alleyways, becoming an exposed target. The strategy kept the enemy disoriented and vulnerable to our fire, which caught it off guard largely from the sides, from behind or from above.”

In the Qasbah, the gangs of terrorists concentrated under a single command. Most of the fugitive Palestinian fighters, the majority of them Tanzim and the minority Hamas, had also holed up there. With great determination, the Palestinians fought with Kalashnikovs and M-16s, prepared to die as “martyrs.”

But the soldiers of the IDF were also highly determined. The battle in the Qasbah moved from house to house. The goal was to limit, at all costs, the number of IDF fighters wounded in battle, and as a result, it was decided that a small operational force would be sent every few minutes to the houses where the terrorists were positioned. The terrorists would begin shooting, thereby exposing themselves to the fire of Israeli snipers waiting on the opposite side. The alleyways were left to the fugitive fighters, and the IDF made use of sniper positions in the homes. Israeli gunmen charged out of unexpected places and hit Palestinians who had prepared to fire on troops that were farther away.

By the third day of the war, the IDF was already in control of two-thirds
of the Qasbah. Lieutenant Colonel Ofek Buhris, the commander of the 51st Battalion, had been deployed to Nablus with his soldiers after fighting in the Mukataa and Jenin, and was in charge of locating explosives' labs and capturing fugitives. He was assigned to entrap Ali Hadiri, one of Hamas's senior engineers, who had prepared the explosive that blew up at the Park Hotel in Netanya. During the raid on the house where the terrorist was staying, a hail of gunfire burst from within, killing a company commander in the Golani Brigade and badly wounding Buhris. Golani soldiers broke into the house and killed Hadiri and another terrorist.

On April 8 at about 7:00
A.M
., all of a sudden, dozens of Palestinians emerged from one of the Qasbah houses, their arms in the air. The surrender of the terrorists had begun. Reports arrived hourly of additional groups turning themselves in; by the afternoon, further surrender deals were being proposed through the Shin Bet and the Civil Administration, Israel's governing body in the West Bank. By six-thirty that evening, the last of the armed men had left the houses of the Nablus Qasbah, their arms raised and waving improvised white flags as a sign of surrender. After seventy-two hours of fighting, seventy terrorists had been killed and hundreds arrested.

But the battle that would become most identified with Operation Defensive Shield would take place in Jenin, remembered because of the number of Israeli casualties—twenty-three dead and seventy-five wounded—and because of Palestinian claims of a massacre carried out by the IDF in the city's refugee camp.

The armed Palestinians, massed at the center of the camp, had laid a trap of thousands of explosive devices and had set up numerous ambushes in the camp's narrow alleyways. Israel's soldiers entered the camp with the assistance of tanks, assault helicopters and D9 bulldozers, which cleared explosives and opened booby-trapped doors. Progress was slow, with Palestinian snipers firing on the troops and making their advance difficult.

On the seventh day of action, a group of reservists from the Nahshon Brigade were caught in an ambush that killed thirteen soldiers. Their comrades charged the terrorists in an effort to rescue the wounded, but
that resulted in more injuries. In the raid's aftermath, the IDF decided to change procedure and destroy every house in which terrorists could hide. The policy included a warning to armed Palestinian fighters to surrender before the bulldozers began their work, which convinced many, among them the most senior terrorists, to turn themselves in. A high-ranking member of Islamic Jihad, Mahmoud Tawalbeh, was killed after refusing to surrender, when a D9 bulldozer caused a wall to collapse on him in the house where he was hiding.

During the fighting, rumors were spread of a massacre carried out by the IDF in Jenin's refugee camp; the Palestinians even cited three thousand as the number killed. The international media accepted the Palestinian claims unquestioningly, until a UN investigative committee arrived on the scene and determined that the real figure was just fifty-six. The IDF claimed that the vast majority of the dead Palestinians were armed terrorists. It may be that the camp's complete closure to the media caused the proliferation of the rumors throughout the world.

The city of Bethlehem was seized by the Jerusalem reservist brigade. Immediately after their entry into Bethlehem, the troops detained dozens of fugitives and quickly gained control of the ancient town. But about forty armed terrorists barricaded themselves in the Church of the Nativity. The IDF, aware of the location's great importance for the rest of the world, had sent the Shaldag commando unit to block off the terrorists' entrance into the church. But the air force ran into delays while flying in the soldiers, and dozens of terrorists managed to hole up in the church, certain that the Israeli forces wouldn't enter or arrest them.

Leading the armed men was Colonel Abdallah Daoud, the head of Palestinian intelligence in Nablus, who took as hostages the forty-six priests staying in the church and roughly two hundred other civilians, among them children. The IDF imposed a blockade on the church for thirty-four days, disrupting the supply of food and water in order to break the will of the wanted men. The Vatican cautioned Israel not to damage the church.

On May 10, 2002, the standoff concluded after Israel agreed to the expulsion of 13 of the fugitives to 6 European countries, as well as the transfer of 26 others to Gaza. During the blockade, six Palestinians were
killed, and Israel captured documents revealing that the residents of Bethlehem, principally Christians, had suffered from harassment by armed men belonging to the Tanzim and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

Over the course of Operation Defensive Shield, five of the six Palestinian cities in the West Bank were occupied. Within a short period, and at a cost of thirty-four dead soldiers, Israel succeeded in putting a stop to the vicious wave of terror, severely degrading the military capability of the Palestinian Authority, isolating Arafat, capturing a great number of fugitives and uncovering vast quantities of explosives and other weapons.

   
AVIV KOCHAVI, COMMANDER OF THE PARATROOPERS BRIGADE AND LATER THE DIRECTOR OF MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

          
“The battle of the Qasbah ended precisely on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The entire brigade was dispersed throughout the Qasbah and the rest of Nablus, after a series of intense battles and a decisive victory over the armed fighters. I decided that we wouldn't give up on marking this special day. We set up a public address system and high-powered speakers, and turned on the radio at the moment of the memorial siren, which echoed through the entire area. Just hours after the end of the battle, all the soldiers of the paratroopers brigade stood at attention in memory of the victims.

              
“It was a very emotional moment and has remained engraved in my memory for two reasons: first, because we proved—against the backdrop, fittingly, of Holocaust Remembrance Day—that there's no place we won't go in order to defeat terror and defend the citizens of Israel. And second, by implementing innovative, sophisticated tactics, we proved that it's possible to do battle in a manner that is simultaneously resolute, professional and ethical, despite fighting in a built-up, crowded area against numerous terrorists. More than seventy terrorists were killed by the brigade, and hundreds were wounded or captured.