‘I wouldn’t believe you if you told me it was night time,’ the officer said coldly. As he stepped towards the house, Abed was filled with dread. He could feel himself about to move and charge to protect his home and his mother even though it would probably be the last thing he ever did in this life.
Shots suddenly rang out nearby, followed by an explosion in the next street. The officer stopped and glanced in that direction, the activity reminding him he had work to get on with. He looked at Abed thoughtfully and then changed his mind. ‘Bring him along,’ he barked as he turned from the door and headed up the alleyway.
Abed was grabbed and held firmly between two soldiers as they marched him briskly behind the officer.
They turned a corner to where several soldiers stood outside a metal door that was the entrance to a breezeblock hut.The officer stopped to talk to them and after a brief discussion faced the door and banged on it loudly.
‘You have been ordered to open up. If you continue to refuse we will open the door ourselves,’ he shouted in Arabic.
He did not wait for a reply and barked an order to his men. Two of them hurried to the door and hung a small canvas pack the size of a brick on the handle. Wires were quickly led from the pack back up the street and all the soldiers except the officer and the two men holding Abed took cover.
‘You have fifteen seconds to open the door or we come in,’ the officer shouted then turned to the soldiers holding Abed and jutted his chin at them.
They moved tightly behind Abed, pressing one side of him against a wall while keeping him facing the door like a shield. Abed could still see part of the charge, the wires trailing from it along the ground and past his feet. Only then did it dawn on him that the soldiers intended to blow the door while he remained exposed. He tried to twist away but an arm reached around his throat and held him in a firm chokehold.
A woman’s voice called out from inside the house that she was coming.
‘Standby,’ the officer said.
The woman called out once again, oblivious to what was going on, her voice growing louder as she walked along her roofless hallway to the door.
If Abed could hear her then the soldiers could too but none of them responded.
‘Standby,’ the officer called out again.
Abed became frantic. This was madness. ‘She’s coming to the door,’ he tried to call out but his words were stifled by the arm about his neck.
‘Now!’ the officer shouted.
The explosion was deafening and the shock wave and bits of debris struck Abed’s body sending him back into the soldiers holding him. Something hit him in the face and stomach and burned for a few seconds, but he did not have time to think about any of it. He was quickly pushed forward towards the hut, the point man of a Roman wedge. The door had been blown completely off, and he was rushed into the hallway and along it, the soldiers remaining tightly behind him in case a desperado within fired upon them. He almost tripped on something on the dark floor. It was a body. But the soldiers held him up and pushed him on. When they reached the end of the narrow passage that opened out into a small yard, the soldiers in the rear rushed past him and quickly entered the rooms. A woman screamed and furniture was smashed, then two young girls were dragged crying from a room and thrown to the ground in the yard where they grabbed each other in utter terror.
Abed was released, his employment as a human shield over for the time being at least, and he looked back up the hallway to the entrance where the body lay beside the fallen door. It was the woman who had called out.The device must have exploded as she reached for the bolt. Her right arm had been blown off above the elbow and half of her face was missing. He knew her. She was the mother of the two girls on the floor holding each other. Her husband was a security guard in a petrol station on the edge of the town. He was probably there tonight. No one would go and tell him until morning when the soldiers had gone and it was safe. Abed was horrified and looked away.
The soldiers could find no one else in the house and after some terse commands from the officer,Abed was pulled back out into the street and held against a wall. He glared at the officer barking orders as the screaming girls were pulled out of the house and taken away. The majority of the soldiers moved on up the street to carry on with their search and the officer faced Abed who was staring back at him with hate-filled eyes. Blood trickled down his face from a cut on his forehead and ran over his nose and mouth, and he wanted nothing more than to tear the officer’s throat out with his teeth. The officer stood in front of Abed, slightly taller and looking down on him.
‘You look angry,’ the officer said calmly. ‘Have we upset you in some way?’
The anger welled uncontrollably inside of Abed and he jerked his head forward as he spat blood into the officer’s eyes. The soldier grabbed Abed by the hair and slammed his head into the wall. The officer wiped his eyes clean with his sleeve and then, taking his time to aim while the soldier held Abed, punched Abed in the stomach so hard it took every ounce of breath out of him as his knees gave way. The soldier did not let Abed fall and gripped his throat to keep him against the wall. Abed could barely recover the air he had lost as the officer wiped the rest of the bloody spittle from his face, took a pace backwards and brought the barrel of his M16 level with Abed’s heart. The soldier held Abed as far away as he could to avoid being splattered with blood. Abed believed his time had come and he calmed himself ready for the bullet.
The officer stared into Abed’s eyes, savouring the moment. He had every reason in the world to kill this Palestinian having lost three of his company in the last month: two to a landmine and one sniped in the back at a checkpoint.The pressure for revenge had come from his men, all conscripts, one of whom had recently lost a sister to a suicide bomber in Jerusalem. But he did not need encouragement. He loved this land more than anything, enough to die for it, and certainly enough to kill those who had promised not to rest until every Israeli was gone or dead.The officer removed the safety catch and curled his finger around the trigger.
‘Wait a minute.’ A voice came from behind the officer. A rugged, tough-looking man in grubby civilian clothing whose face had not seen a razor in weeks stepped from an alleyway with a similar-looking partner who remained in the shadows while the first man, holding a notepad, came over to the group.
The officer lowered his gun and looked at the intruder with guarded contempt. He knew these men were Mossad and although he did not like them, he had no choice but to tolerate them. They called the shots on operations like this one. What the officer resented was the way they made him feel like a lackey of Mossad. His family had spent five generations in Israel having moved to the land before the Second World War. They had fought in just about every battle of survival since then and his father had been an officer during the Yom Kippur war and commanded a company under Sharon during the invasion of Lebanon, taking part as an observer in the infamous massacre by Phalangist militia of hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. He was an army man through and through and proud of it, and resented these spooks lording it over him.
‘What’s his name?’ the Mossad agent asked the officer.
‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’
The agent looked at him, guarding his own contemptuous feelings about the officer, which were not very different from the officer’s perceptions.
‘What’s your name?’ the agent said to Abed.
Abed hesitated, still in shock from his near-death experience and suffering from the torture of knowing it was only a temporary reprieve.
‘I asked you your name,’ the agent said without any malevolence.
‘Abed Abu Omar.’
The agent checked his notepad and then looked at Abed as if with a fresh pair of eyes.
‘Let him go,’ the agent said.
The officer’s mouth opened like that of a fish.‘This has nothing to do with you.’
‘I said let him go,’ the agent repeated calmly. The officer knew he was stepping into a fight he would not win. Mossad had the last word in virtually everything and if he disobeyed, he would pay a severe price. His career would be over for one, and that alone was enough to keep him in check. He lowered his gun and relaxed his shoulders in reluctant deference.
Another burst of gunfire came from a couple of streets away.The agent let his eyes linger on the officer’s long enough to hammer the message home that he was in charge, then disappeared up an alleyway with his partner.
The officer spat on the ground in the direction of the agents and mumbled an obscenity before returning his attention to Abed. ‘Why did they spare you?’ he asked.
Abed was even more surprised than the officer, and was feeling almost high with relief.‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘You think I give a shit what he said?’
Abed’s relief went screaming into reverse.
‘This isn’t over,’ he said. ‘I’m going to save you for another time, make you sweat a little.’
The officer removed the magazine from his M16, cocked the weapon and caught the bullet that ejected from the breech. ‘You see this,’ he said holding the bullet up to Abed’s face. ‘This is yours . . . Kiss it.’ He pushed it against Abed’s bloody lips, grinding it into his mouth, cutting his gums.
‘There, it has your kiss. Now, listen carefully. This is what I’m going to do with it. I’m going to give it to one of my snipers - he’s the best in Israel - and I’m going to tell him to give it back to you one day. Maybe in a week, maybe in a month, but one day, you’ll get it back. Right through your head. Or perhaps I’ll just do it myself.’
The officer let the threat sink in, stepped back and placed the bullet in a breast pocket. He pushed the magazine back into its housing on the weapon, pulled the cocking arm until it was all the way back, then released it on its spring to load a new bullet into the breech with a slam.
‘Take him away,’ he said. The soldier yanked Abed down the street and around the corner to a waiting truck where a dozen other men from the camp were pressed inside, some of them bloody, all looking frightened.Abed’s hands were bound behind his back and he was pushed up and into the truck. Two soldiers climbed in, shoving their prisoners further along, the tailgate was slammed shut and the truck drove away.
Abed was kept in a holding cell for a week along with several other prisoners before he was removed for interrogation. He was questioned for an hour after which he was returned to the cell. Two days later he was unceremoniously released, wearing the shirt and jeans from a Palestinian prisoner who apparently would never need them again.
When he opened his front door, he stopped in the doorway. Strewn about the hallway and small yard was their household furniture and belongings, or what was left of them. Anything that could be broken had been. A pile of clothes in a corner had been defecated on. Filled with immediate concern for his mother he hurried down the hallway to the entrance of the main room where he saw her huddled in a corner wrapped in a blanket. When she looked up and saw him, he could feel the relief gush from her as she leapt to her feet and ran into his arms, sobbing uncontrollably. He held her close, stroked her and kissed her head. ‘It’s okay, Mother. I’m all right.’
She would not let go of him and after a minute or so he gently pushed her away to look at her. ‘Are you okay? Did they hurt you?’ he asked.
She shook her head and tried to smile as the tears ran down her face, then took hold of him again as if he were a dream which might disappear any moment. ‘It’s okay,’ he assured her. ‘It’s all okay now.’
But he was wrong. The officer was true to his word and made sure Abed did not forget there was a bullet with his name on it.The first reminder came a couple of weeks after the incursion as he stood in the street outside his front door drinking a bottle of Coke and taking a moment to feel the sun on his face. The bottle shattered in his hand as a single shot rang out from no-man’s-land on the Gaza-Egypt border a hundred yards away. He dived back into his house, his hand bleeding from a cut caused by the shattering glass and wrapped a cloth around it to stem the flow. The sniper had missed him, but Abed knew it was not through lack of skill.The IDF snipers were far too good to miss someone standing still from that range.They had plenty of practice.The shot had been a reminder, a message that Abed had not been forgotten and his day would soon come.
A week later he was open for business in his new metal shop situated on the corner of a block near the marketplace only a few hundred metres from home. After finishing welding a metal framework for a door he turned off the acetylene torch and accidentally knocked a tool off the bench. As he bent down to pick it up a shot slammed into the wall behind him where his head had been a second before and ricocheted off several metal sheets in various parts of the shop before lodging itself in the ceiling. People in the street outside scattered with practised alarm and Abed flung himself to the floor behind his bench just as another shot slammed into one of the metal table legs in front of his face, splattering him with flakes of rust and dirt. The adrenaline soared through his veins as he realised the day of his execution had come and the sniper had so far been unlucky. He could not stay where he was and crawled as fast as he could across the floor, heading for a corner out of view from the street. Another shot rang out but no bullet entered his shop. It sounded different, louder, as if fired from close by. Abed remained tight in the corner unable to see out of the shop, which hopefully meant the sniper could not see inside.
He lay there for what seemed an age, contemplating his situation.The bottom line was it was only a matter of time before he was killed as the officer had promised. If he was going to stay alive, he had to do something radical and he spent the next few hours mulling over his options.