No Mission Is Impossible (28 page)

              
“The battle ended with the surrender of the terrorists: after they were squeezed and surrounded on all sides, their leader
called the representative of District Coordination, who was with me at the command post, and asked to organize his surrender with three hundred of his men. We arranged the terms, and the terrorists marched to a specified location, where they turned over their weapons and were arrested.”

   
YITZHAK (“JERRY”) GERSHON, COMMANDER OF THE WEST BANK DIVISION AND LATER OF THE HOME FRONT COMMAND

          
“An all-out war on terror was being waged in Judea and Samaria when I assumed my functions as commander of the West Bank Division. The IDF had been fighting terrorists for ten months but, for various reasons, hadn't looked its best. I felt that the weighty task of providing security had been placed on my shoulders, and I understood that it was me and the forces under my authority who would make the difference. We changed the operational paradigm and led hundreds of special operations, some in refugee camps.

              
“The change was felt on the ground and yielded meaningful operational successes. More and more commanders and decision makers at the level of the military staff reached the sensible conclusion that it was our obligation to decide the fate of this war that had been forced upon us.

              
“When Defensive Shield was authorized, two operations of the most sensitive nature were assigned to us: Ramallah and Nablus. Ramallah was the site and seat of Arafat's power and the center of the Palestinian Authority; Nablus was the terror capital. The character of the operations resembled that of the intensive activity that preceded Defensive Shield, requiring initiative and aggressiveness, determination and creative thinking. The operation highlighted the intelligent integration of all the components of military force, along with tight coordination with Shin Bet, the Internal Security Service.

              
“Defensive Shield achieved a physical and psychological turning point in the Palestinian terror in Judea and Samaria.”

In 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally retreats from the Gaza Strip. The Jewish settlements are evacuated and the settlers forced to leave their homes and seek new homes in Israel. The IDF pulls out all its forces from the Strip. Israel's leaders hoped that Gaza, now fully independent, will devote all its efforts to building a thriving economy and a prosperous free society.

The opposite happens. The Hamas terrorist organization seizes power in Gaza and turns it into a base of bloody, incessant attacks on Israel's civilian population.

“Cast Lead,” 2008

O
n December 27, 2008, at 11:30
A.M
., several F-15 jets of the IAF dived over scores of targets all over the Gaza Strip. The lead plane launched its missiles on Arafat City, a large government complex in the center of Gaza. The attack targeted a graduation ceremony for police cadets, most of them members of the “Izz al-Din al-Qassam,” Hamas's death squads. The other jets, and a few helicopters, launched massive aerial bombings on roughly one hundred Hamas targets across the Gaza Strip. In a few minutes they pulverized command posts, armories, underground rocket and missile launchers, and the organization's training sites. Operation Cast Lead had begun.

This first round of bombing caught Hamas completely off guard and unprepared. One hundred fifty-five terrorists were killed, eighty-nine of them at the police graduation ceremony.

As the campaign continued, the air force assaulted forty tunnels in the Philadelphi Corridor (a narrow strip along the border of Gaza and
Egypt) with bunker-busting bombs, in order to disrupt the smuggling of arms from Egypt. Strategic targets were also blown up, the objective being to undermine Hamas rule: government offices, television studios, the central prison, the general intelligence building, the city hall in Beit Hanoun, the Islamic University and more.

“We're talking about a great number of aircraft in a very small area with the goal of attacking buildings in very crowded places, where any misfire could hit a school or nursery,” former IAF brigadier-general Ran Pecker-Ronen told the journalist Amir Bohbot. “Their accuracy was amazing, the execution perfect. I don't believe there's another air force in the world capable of carrying out these sorts of attacks at such a high level of precision.”

The Israeli government, headed by Ehud Olmert, decided to launch Cast Lead after a large-scale, prolonged barrage of thousands of Qassam rockets on the towns and cities near Gaza. For many months, residents of the area had lived in fear, forced to sleep in safety rooms and bomb shelters. It was an absurd situation; no other nation in the world would have accepted being subjected to the daily firing of rockets on its civilian population. The cease-fire that had been reached via Egyptian mediation in June 2008 had collapsed completely, and Israel's southern region was subject to a real war, in which Palestinians fired rockets, Israel responded with bombings by the air force, and the pattern continued. The residents of the south were paying the price.

The objective of Cast Lead would be to end the Palestinian missile fire, destroy Hamas operational abilities and prevent its rearmament.

The IDF received authorization to carry out targeted killings, and eliminated senior members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad one after another, among them Said Siam, the Hamas government's interior minister; his brother Iyad Siam, another Hamas senior official; and Nizar Rayan, number three in Hamas's political wing. Rayan was killed when his home was bombed from the air; he died along with eighteen friends and relatives who had stayed in the house in spite of the IAF warnings. The building in which he lived had served as a command post, communications center, storage facility for weaponry and ammunitions, and a tunnel entrance.

The Southern District commander, General Yoav Galant, told the journalist Shmuel Haddad, “In the past, each Hamas commander built himself a three-story house, in which the basement level served as a storage area for materiel, the middle level as a command post, and the family lived on the third floor. For years, they assumed that the IDF wouldn't strike the building because of the family. We've changed the paradigm, warning the family by a telephone call and by firing a small, harmless ‘knock on the roof' warning missile. Later, the building is bombed, and from then on the Hamas terrorist is left to worry about the fact that he has neither a command station nor a home for his family.”

On January 3, the IDF launched the operation's second stage with the shelling of Gaza and the entrance of ground forces into the Strip's northern end. The offensive was intended to seize missile-launching areas, to cut off Gaza City from the rest of the Strip and increase the damage that the IDF was inflicting on Hamas, principally at points where the air force had no advantage—like armories, tunnels, bunkers and underground command posts. Ten thousand reservists fought alongside twenty thousand regular soldiers.

The forces fought primarily on built-up territory, facing ambushes, suicide bombers, and booby-trapped houses. It was a house-to-house—and, at times, face-to-face fight—battle. Homes used for terrorist activity or found to be booby-trapped were razed; during the fighting, roughly six hundred houses were destroyed.

Israel's offensive in Gaza began with the Golani, Givati and the paratrooper brigades breaking into the Strip from different and unanticipated directions. Merkava tanks of the armored 188th “Lightning” Brigade, which had defended the Golan Heights in the Yom Kippur War, blocked the passage from Rafiah and Khan Younis to Gaza City, thus disrupting the supply of arms to Hamas. The 401st Brigade, nicknamed “Iron Trails,” established a buffer zone in the center of the strip, by the former settlement of Netzarim. IDF engineers, often employing mini-robots, defused explosives and booby-trapped houses. Saving the soldiers' lives was the mission's top priority; consequently, massive efforts were spent preventing unnecessary risks, even at the cost of civilians being hit.

Cast Lead—the fighters at the gates of Gaza.

(Neil Cohen, IDF Spokesman)

“The entry into Gaza was relatively quick,” said a senior officer after the battle. “We felt that Hamas was in shock, which in turn significantly undermined the resistance they had prepared. The houses were packed very close together, with a portion of them booby-trapped. There were also motorcycles at the ready for abductions. Almost every other hour, there was an attempt by a male or female suicide bomber to run at us and detonate an explosive belt. In the booby-trapped houses, we found shafts leading to tunnels designated for kidnapping soldiers.”

On January 6, the Palestinians claimed that an IDF mortar had killed thirty people sheltered at the al-Fahoura school, a facility run by UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. The shell had targeted the school yard, where a rocket had been launched at Israel; in response, the IDF had fired three mortars. Two hit the school yard, killing two of the terrorists in action, while the third errantly struck the neighboring school, thirty yards away. But an investigation by Canada's
Globe and Mail
revealed that, contrary to Palestinian reports, not thirty
people but just three had been killed by shrapnel, when they had gone outside the building.

Hamas's ability to resist the IDF operation was weaker than the Israelis had anticipated. The Palestinians intensified the rocket fire into Israeli territory; over the course of Cast Lead, 730 rockets were launched into Israel, among them long-range Grad weapons that reached Ashdod, Ashkelon, Yavne and Be'er Sheva.

Hamas systematically fired from houses of civilians, whose lives it did not hesitate to put at risk. An IDF officer found a document that contained Hamas's battle plan, including the deployment of terror teams next to a mosque, the placement of large improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in a heavily populated area and even the booby-trapping of schools and the zoo. Yuval Diskin, then the head of the Shin Bet, Israel's domestic intelligence service, told journalists, “A considerable portion of the activists are hiding in hospitals, some at Shifa, some in maternity hospitals. A few are going around in doctors' and nurses' uniforms.” The Shifa hospital director categorically denied his statements.

One incident seared into the public consciousness was the death of three daughters of Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian doctor who had for years worked in hospitals in Israel. Two IDF tank shells had struck his home in Jabalia, killing the three girls and injuring another. At the moment of the attack, Dr. Abuelaish was speaking with TV Channel 10 reporter Shlomi Eldar. Crying out hysterically, he pleaded with the journalist, a friend, to ask the IDF to stop shooting at his home. The IDF subsequently claimed that it had targeted the home because of shooting originating from there.

After twenty-two days of fighting, Prime Minister Olmert stopped the operation, rejecting the third stage proposed by General Galant—to cut off the Gaza Strip from Sinai. Olmert declared a unilateral ceasefire: “Hamas's military capabilities and control infrastructure have been hit hard. The present campaign has once again proven Israel's strength and deterrence capability.”

On the Israeli side, thirteen had been killed, among them ten soldiers.
According to IDF estimates, 1,166 Palestinians were killed, 709 of them members of Hamas. The Palestinians counted 1,417 dead. Four thousand homes were entirely destroyed, along with 48 public and government buildings.

Operation Cast Lead produced severe damage to Israel's international image. On September 15, 2009, Richard Goldstone, a South African former judge appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, submitted a scathing report to the UN portraying Israel as having committed war crimes and “crimes against humanity.”

In April 2011, however, Goldstone made his mea culpa in a
Washington Post
article, admitting that his report hadn't been accurate and contained unjust accusations againt Israel. “If I had known then what I know now,” he wrote, “the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”

   
YOAV GALANT, HEAD OF ISRAEL'S SOUTHERN COMMAND

          
“We embarked on the operation in order to hit Hamas and create deterrence, and to force it to halt its missile fire for an extended period. No less important, in my eyes, was the need to sear into its consciousness that it would pay a heavy price for targeting Israel's citizens and sovereignty. Hamas was surprised by the timing of the action, the force of the attack and the wide-scale entry of ground forces into its territory, as well as by the timing of the withdrawal and the speed with which it was carried out.

              
“This was the first time that the IDF struck at Hamas so comprehensively. The attack was carried out in a focused, continuous, intensive way, with thousands of bombs dropped on hundreds of targets, among them command posts, weapons caches, tunnels, bunkers and government offices. The ground maneuvers were performed by strengthened battalion forces, and at any given moment, there were seven thousand fighters within the Strip. The IDF achieved tight coordination between our intelligence and air, sea and land forces.

              
“Two weeks after the start of the operation, I recommended to the chief of staff that we carry out the third stage of the original plan: to cut the Gaza Strip off from Sinai by encircling and occupying Rafiah. This process would have brought about a disruption of the pipeline used for weapons smuggling, suicide bombers and more. But the plan wasn't authorized because it might have led to great losses.”

Four years later . . .

PILLAR OF DEFENSE, 2012

The electronic signal flashed across the navigation system of the drone, which, according to the London
Sunday Times
, was circling above the mosques and refugee camps of Gaza. The drone dived toward Gaza City center. Its cameras scanned the streets, focusing on a silver Kia carrying a tracking device, which crossed an intersection and turned into Omar Mukhtar Street.

The passenger of the Kia was Ahmed Jabari, Hamas's chief of staff. He had become the commander of Hamas's military wing in 2003, after his predecessor, Mohammed Deif, was severely wounded during an Israeli Air Force attack. Jabari, a member of a Hebron-based clan, had been imprisoned in Israel for thirteen years because of terrorist activities. When he was freed, in 1995, he became a key Hamas figure, managing overseas relations, fund-raising and the planning of terror attacks. As Hamas's military chief of staff, he oversaw weapons production, the use of mortars and rockets, the smuggling of arms, and other military and intelligence activity. Jabari had directed dozens of terror operations against Israeli citizens, as well as the firing of Qassam rockets into Israeli territory; he was responsible for the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit and had signed the agreement for his return.