Posted on 04/24/2002 12:05:55 PM PDT by areafiftyone
Abdel al-Karim Uda, the suicide bomber who killed 28 people at the Park Hotel on the seder night, was not meant to act alone. A second bomber was supposed to be with him, but Nidal Kalk, from the Nur al Shams refugee camp near Tul Karm never showed up for the attack. According to one report, he was sick, according to another, he did not receive the explosives belt he was supposed to wear.
Kalk was arrested in a village near Tul Karm on April 12, during Operation Defensive Shield. The details of his planned involvement only became known during the operation. And Kalk is not the only suicide bomber captured during the operation. Another 19 potential bombers - including six women - were caught.
The end of the operation, except for the complications at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Muqata in Ramallah, enables the various security forces to form a preliminary summary of the operation. So far, details about the successes of the operation have been made public only during fleeting media appearances by the chief of staff and the commander of military intelligence.
But a meeting with a senior security official yesterday provided a much broader picture of the intelligence arena as a result of the operation.
The details are indeed instructive. As of Sunday night there were 1,765 people under arrest, and of 65 people on a list of wanted suspects given to the PA before the operation, 15 were under arrest and three were killed.
But more important says the source, is the issue of deterrence. "There is no doubt that was our problem before the operation," he says. "But Defensive Shield made clear what happens when the State of Israel decides to operate decisively and massively." Not even during the Six-Day War, when Israel captured the territory, were there so many tanks in action in the area as there were during the 23 days of the Defensive Shield operation.
On the assumption that most of the West Bank's residents were born after 1967, or were children at the time, this was their first experience of the full power of Israel's occupation. This time, the source says, it was clear what Israel means when it says enough is enough." His conclusion: "Everyone now knows that if the terror resumes, it won't take 18 months until we react in that manner. Until now we've understood the limits of our force, now, the Palestinians understand the advantages of our power."
That understanding is evident, he believes, in the relative quiet with which Gaza responded to the violence in the West Bank. Despite threats, the Gazan terror did not leak into Israel, both because of the fence - and the widescale deployment of the army - around the strip, and because of the fear of an Israeli reprisal. The Palestinian Authority and the terror groups in Gaza were convinced at the start of the operation that the IDF would also move into Gaza.
The wave of terror attacks in March, says the senior source, "was something Israel could not stand. The Palestinians brought the operation down upon themselves. There was no other way to deal with the terror from Area A. Without Palestinian prevention, moving the front to their cities was the only way to go."
A large proportion of the arrests of senior terror activists was made possible thanks to the IDF's presence in the territory. The incursions to the cities drove the wanted men to the countryside, where they were quickly identified and rounded up by the Shin Bet.
There is a direct correlation between the army's duration in a particular city and its success in capturing the wanted men in those places. In Nablus, there was a serious blow to the terror networks, but a number of the wanted men, including Jamal Triawi from the Tanzim, and some Hamas operatives, got away. The IDF was in Tul Karm and Qalqilyah relatively briefly, and there is fear the terror networks in those towns, so close to the Green Line, will quickly manage to get back into operation.
Unlike the operations in Nablus and Jenin, and the previous incursion to Tul Karm, the IDF did not manage in Tul Karm and Qalqilyah to create a pocket into which the wanted men would try to escape, and be arrested.
There were also at least two top wanted men who managed to slip through the IDF's hands after they were arrested. One, Mansur Sharm, who took over from Raed Karmi after his assassination as leader of the Tanzim in Tul Karm, gave a fake name when he surrendered to Golani troops, and only after he was released, did the Shin Bet realize it missed him.
The prisoner investigations have yielded a lot of information but there are still some mysteries. Who, for example, was the sniper who shot dead 10 Israelis at the old British police station on the road to Ofra? But there have also been discoveries, like the fact that it was Hamas, and not Fatah, responsible for killing six soldiers at the Ein Ariq checkpoint. One of the controllers of the cell was captured in Ramallah.
Meanwhile, the defense establishment is preparing the arguments and evidence it will present to the UN commission due here at the end of the week to investigate the events in the Jenin refugee camp. They have the testimony of Thabet Mardawi, a top Islamic Jihad commander, who detailed for his interrogators how he and his men fought from the houses inside the camp.
Yesterday, another incident came up - how the IDF chased down a wanted man, Husam Badran, head of the Hamas military wing in Nablus, to an orange grove in the Jordan Valley last week. For fear that there might be children in the grove, the IDF laid siege to it for seven hours, using drones to try to locate the man hiding inside. They finally decided to drop one bomb, not 12, and in the end used two bombs. Any other army, said IDF sources, "would have blanketed" the grove with bombs. Badran was arrested and two suspects with him were killed. No children were found in the grove.
Shin Bet and the IDF are also satisfied they were right to attack their long-time colleague, Jibril Rajoub's Preventive Security Services headquarters in west Ramallah. Their reason - the capture of 13 wanted men who were hiding in the headquarters, and Marwan Barghouti, who was there until a day before the assault on the headquarters.
"Rajoub won't be replaced so quickly," said the senior source. "I don't recommend anyone eulogize him. He is well-regarded by the Palestinians, in Arab capitals, and in the West." Nor does the discovery of terrorist activity by some of his men disqualify him from dialogue with Israel, just as involvement by Tawfik Tirawi, a much bigger terrorist, as the source said, does not disqualify him. "We cannot decide who leads them. In the end, we'll have to talk with them."
And with regard to Barghouti, sources in the security services say the evidence against the Tanzim leader, who is sticking to politics in his interrogations, is mounting. The evidence includes instructions he gave to terrorists, financial aid for them, and the timing for attacks - Barghouti gave explicit orders to keep things quiet whenever American envoys were in the area. The Shin Bet's interrogators say it is only a matter of time before he "breaks," like other prisoners they are holding. But Barghouti is insisting he is a politician, not like some of the Palestinian fighters in the hands of the Shin Bet - such as Thabet Mardawi - who are happy to volunteer information. Or, as Abdel Karim Awis, a top Fatah commander said, "I'll tell you everything. In any case you'll eventually have to let me go." As a result, say Shin Bet sources, there has been very little of the "shaking" that was once known as "moderate physical pressure" against "ticking bombs."
For a suicide bomber to call out sick, he must be REALLY sick.
Can't have suicide bombers coming to work sick. He might infect others.
nor did he dress properly for work
What?? You found one?? GOOD SHOW! Now, if we could just discover that elusive modicum of islamic conscience...
What brain?
"You're right, we will....[BANG!]...Release him."
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