Hunting For Suicide Bombers
Israel’s elite undercover units take fire from human rights groups. But where would Israel be without them?
Samuel M. Katz
Word of the suicide bombing at the Jerusalem pedestrian mall spread quickly from village to village throughout the West Bank. Throngs of young unemployed men filled the mosques, eager to hear sermons hailing Hamas’s deadly work on Ben Yehuda Street. It was early September 1997, and the streets of Nablus had an air of celebration and victory. Among the Palestinian revelers were two black men wearing galabiya robes who had stopped by the mosques to hear orations before continuing their search for work. The Nablus area is known for its large Sudanese population, and the two men walking arm-in-arm—clad in traditional Sudanese garb—looked as if they belonged. Their teeth were brown and yellow; their Afros nappy and unkempt.
But a closer inspection would have revealed that these two men were very different. Under their robes, nestled in canvas holsters fastened to their inner thighs, both men carried Israeli-issued Jericho 9mm automatics; miniaturized communications gear was concealed inside a shopping bag. These men, natives of Ethiopia, were operatives from an elite Israeli undercover unit called Ya’mas. They had been dispatched into the heart of Area B—the part of the West Bank that is under Israeli military and Palestinian civil control—on an intelligence assignment. Their mission: to gather any information that would identify those men responsible for the Sept. 4, 1997, triple-suicide bombing on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda Street, which claimed 5 lives and injured nearly 100.
The operatives’ disguise was not simply a matter of the clothes they wore. A former Hollywood-trained Israeli motion picture industry make-up artist, a part-time officer in the unit, had spent hours with the duo, giving them complexions that ensured they would blend in. Indeed, the operatives had endured some of the most grueling, rigorous physical and emotional training to prepare them for exactly this moment.
The men slipped easily from mosque to mosque, mingling with joyous Palestinians, gleaning what they could, pushing their intelligence gathering right up to the edge, aware that success could save the lives of scores of Israelis and failure could cost them their own. In the days and weeks that followed, other Ya’mas operatives would wind their way through the same villages, seeking crucial bits of intelligence. The payoff came on the morning of Sept. 21, 1997, when special operations units from the Israel Defense Force (IDF) and the Israeli National Police, armed with information obtained from the undercover sorties, raided the villages just outside of Nablus in search of those who masterminded the suicide bombing. The commandos were armed with precise descriptions of the men they were after, and, in many cases, had their home addresses. By the time it was over, 70 Hamas terrorists had been captured in a pre-dawn sweep, along with caches of automatic rifles and handguns, and enough explosives to produce a hundred suicide bombs.
In the field, as the suspects were blindfolded, handcuffed, and taken into captivity, senior commanders quietly praised the undercover squads that had made the operation possible. “These units definitely save lives,” said General David Tzur, commander of the police’s special operations unit. “It is just impossible to put a number on the people they have kept from harm, because it is impossible to tell just how many suicide bombings these units have prevented.”
Israel’s costumed commandos, or Mista’arvim, are nothing new in the bloody landscape of the Middle East. They have been operating at least since 1909, when a group known as the Shomer provided security for early Jewish settlements in Palestine. As recently as five years ago, however, in the early stages of the implementation of the Oslo Accord, the Israeli daily Ma’ariv wrote that the undercover units “are thinning and will eventually be dismantled.” That prediction proved premature, and undercover units soon became an integral element of Israel’s shadow war against Hamas suicide bombing cells, which terrorized Israel from April 1994 to the fall of 1997. Israel’s police and military undercover units are an essential Israeli tool in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, particularly in Area B. And in October, following what has become known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada, undercover police squads were dispatched to the Galilee to help quell violent outbreaks in the Arab town of Umm al Fahm—marking the first time the undercover units had been deployed within Israel.
And yet, as the role of the units expands, they are increasingly attacked by international human rights groups and concerned Israelis who say that the ends (protecting Israel) do not justify the means (often violent operations that result in casualties on both sides). In fact, despite their achievements, the units have been attacked by Israeli politicians and pilloried by the press as “hit squads.” The debate over these units and their operations intensified recently after a botched mission left three Israeli soldiers dead from friendly fire. Many Israelis are now wondering about the future of the units—leaving the operatives themselves feeling snubbed. “It angers me that after all we’ve done and all we’ve come up against, people still think of us as a death squad,” said a veteran Ya’mas operator (for security reasons the undercover agents cannot be identified). “We have to shoot because we operate eye-to-eye with killers. We function in areas where terrorists feel safe, and then [we] try to apprehend people who have vowed to martyr themselves in a holy war against us.
“They don’t surrender easily,” the operative said. “They fight to the death.”
The Costumed Commandos
The term mista’arev—derived from the Arabic expression musta’arvim, meaning “intervening”—describes a non-Arab who dresses in Arab garb, acts in accordance with Arab manners and customs, speaks Arabic, and lives or operates in an Arab area. The first Mista’arvim, the Shomer guards, rode Arabian horses, dressed in traditional Arab garments, and spoke fluent Arabic. The Haganah, the military arm of the Jewish settlers in pre-independence Israel, created its own Arabist intelligence unit to counter the Arab revolt of 1936, dispatching agents to infiltrate Arab villages. During World War II, a Haganah Arabist platoon called the Syrian Company was set up with British support to carry out sabotage missions deep behind Vichy lines in Syria and Lebanon. Many of these early undercover agents later joined the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic counterespionage and counter terrorist organization, and the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence and espionage wing. From Israel’s capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 to the counter-terrorist mission of the Pomegranate Recon unit in the Gaza Strip in 1970 to deep-penetration operations in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, Israeli agents have masqueraded as Arabs.
More than any other person, it was Ehud Barak—first as a major general between 1987 and 1991, and then as chief of staff of the IDF from 1991 to 1995—who pushed the use of undercover commando squads to counter terrorism in the territories. Barak, Israel’s most decorated soldier and one of the pillars of the elite Sayeret Mat’kal commando unit, knew the value of disguise in executing operations deep behind enemy lines. In 1973 Barak himself masqueraded as a woman on a raid in Beirut. It was Barak who in 1987, as commander of the IDF Central Command, authorized the establishment of Duvdevan (Cherry)—an undercover military and intelligence unit whose purpose was to hunt terrorists in the West Bank. The idea was to create a dynamic force to battle terrorists tactically and psychologically. The first soldiers in the unit, all volunteers, were given a complete undercover-instruction regimen, including a disguise course, counterterrorist training, and intensive instruction in Arabic and Palestinian customs. The success of this unit prompted the IDF to form a second unit, in 1988, to take the battle to Gaza. The Gaza unit was fittingly tabbed “Shimshon” after Samson, the biblical hero who fought the Philistines by wit and ruse. (Shimshon was disbanded in 1994, as Israel began turning the Gaza Strip over to Palestinian control under the Oslo Accords.)
In 1990, two years after the Intifada began, National Police Border Guard commander Meshulam Amit created a third unit, Yichidat Mista’arvim (undercover unit), or Ya’mas. Ya’mas had natural advantages that the other units did not. For one, the border guards from which Ya’mas recruited had operated mainly in Palestinian areas, and the guards therefore had learned local customs in the field. The guard was the only Israeli security establishment in which Bedouin and Druze served alongside Jews, and it had a substantial number of Ethiopians in its ranks—officers who could pose as Sudanese and North African migrants.
Ya’mas quickly became the elite Israeli undercover unit. By 1994 Ya’mas had captured 70 of the top Hamas fugitives wanted by the Shin Bet and the police. The unit had also captured hundreds of low-level operatives and, according to a report in the Israeli daily Ma’ariv, killed more than 50 terrorists in West Bank firefights.
In 1995 Jerusalem district police chief Arieh Amit formed a fourth undercover unit, Gideon, and charged it with special counterterrorist duty in East Jerusalem as well as other sections of the capital. Together, Duvdevan, Ya’mas, and Gideon cover the West Bank territories, the borders, the alleys and byways of East Jerusalem, and increasingly, the territory inside the Green Line. These units gather intelligence and arrest suspects. Between 1988 and 1995, the police and army undercover squads were the busiest units in Israel, deploying daily and nightly for ambushes, intelligence gathering, and arrests. Wearing theatrical make-up, they targeted terrorists in Gaza, Ramallah, and Hebron, apprehending hundreds of the most wanted terrorists in the territories. With each mission, they engendered more and more disdain from Palestinians—but also, surprisingly, a grudging respect. “These men used ruthless and provocative measures to infiltrate our villages and towns,” said a senior commander of the Palestinian police in Ramallah, who requested anonymity, “but their methods were ultimately successful.”
Life Savers or Death Squads?
In 1992, education minister and member of the left-leaning Meretz Party Shulamit Aloni issued a scathing rebuke of Israel’s elite undercover units. “I oppose in principle 18- and 19-year-old boys judging the … Palestinians and implementing their death sentence,” Aloni said. Indeed, human rights groups around the world—from Amnesty International to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem (the Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories)—have been openly critical of the units’ modus operandi. A B’Tselem spokeswoman put it this way: “The organization considers the work of those units as illegal, since their work methods force them to enter into life-threatening situations, when they have to shoot to defend themselves, therefore causing the death of Palestinians which could be avoided … In many cases there was no serious attempt to arrest people, and there was a general atmosphere that killing the ‘wanted’ person is not illegal—despite the fact that those people were never convicted and were only suspect according to information from the General Security Service.”
According to the most recent statistics compiled by B’Tselem, 116 Palestinians have been killed by gunfire from undercover units whose principal task was to arrest wanted terrorists. In most of the cases, the suspects were alleged to have committed serious offenses, such as murdering Palestinians who “collaborated” with Israel or attacking Israeli civilians or security forces. Nineteen of the 116 Palestinians were under the age of 16; 29 of those killings occurred after the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993. Only 13 of the killings were investigated by either the IDF or the national police, and they have not yielded any convictions.
It was Aloni’s remarks, however, that really fueled the anger of the undercover operatives. Faced with a public relations disaster, the IDF made Duvdevan and Shimshon operators available to radio and newspaper reporters, hoping to humanize the agents. “I cannot understand how a minister in the Israeli government has the nerve to say such a thing,” said a Duvdevan team leader, identified only as “D” by the newspaper Hadashot. “A person who doesn’t understand what we do should shut up!”
Other agents used the opportunity to try and shed light on the precarious nature of their work. “G,” a former Ya’mas operator, pointed out that since the agents are always working undercover, there is a constant risk of friendly fire accidents. “A small mistake could result in the death of a comrade … a friend, or someone who is unarmed,” G said. “I am trained better than perhaps any other fighter in Israel, but no training can prepare me for living with myself if I make a mistake.” A former Duvdevan operator added: “All those who think of us as cold-blooded terminators have no clue as to what we are all about … Our definition of a perfect operation is one where none of the operators even had to reach for their weapons.”
And yet, even speaking in their own defense, it becomes clear how easily the line can become blurred. “If I say I have to trample ten children, then I mean ten children who are in my way, not ten children that I want to trample because they happen to be in the area,” a Duvdevan operator identified only as “A” told B’Tselem in the summer of 1994, when the organization took testimony from the agents in an attempt to glean a better understanding of their work. “If a terrorist is in a house and I have to go into that house and get him out, and that involves all kinds of things, then I will do them. Even if there is a small child or a woman in the place. I don’t mean that I will have to kill … But things that I will do there could definitely get people upset.”
Life on the Inside
The married couple walked slowly up the dirt road, apparently resigned to an unsuccessful search for shade from the West Bank summer sun. The man, who was in his 40s, wore a tattered sport coat and black slacks, and looked like he might be returning fromýa business meeting. His wife, short and stocky, and covered by a white veil, carried a purse and a handkerchief. The man smoked a cigarette, and the woman walked some five feet behind him. Halfway toward a junction, they stopped at a roadside stand selýing fruit and bread. “I need three kilos of tomatoes,” the man told a teenager who was working behind the stand, listening to a selection of Hamas war songs on an Aiwa boombox. The vendor could not have known that the woman had a digital camera concealed inside her purse. Nor could he see three snipers hiding in the drying green brush some 500 yards away.
A mile down the road—in a well-concealed olive grove—some 30 men assembled behind two vehicles as they conducted a final weapons’ check. Inside a white Econoline van, real-time images of the fruit stand popped up on a small black-and-white screen. “It looks routine,” one of the men said, drawing a black mask over his face. “OK, then,” another man said as he nestled a silver-plated Jericho 941 9mm automatic into his black canvas holster. “Let’s go.”
A house near the fruit stand was the target this blistering August afternoon—a Hamas hideout sheltering a fugitive wanted for his role in several suicide bombings. The fruit stand was a Hamas lookout post. When the word came down, the first Israeli van headed toward the house. In the van, were seven young men in red and white kaffiyehs who were posing as day laborers. As the van pulled up to the fruit stand, the men inside emerged to buy cigarettes and stretch their legs. As the vendor made change and concentrated on the wad of bills in his hand, a second van—a white Econoline adorned with decals of the al-Aqsa Mosque as if it were a Hamas-run medical clinic—moved slowly up the road. Within seconds, the day laborers produced their handguns and subdued the lookouts. Six men, wearing olive fatigues and black face masks, and armed with automatic weapons, jumped out of the second vehicle. A third van, which came up the dirt road at 80 miles per hour, carried armed men with ladders, who climbed onto the hideaway’s roof. An explosive charge popped open the front iron door in an ear-splitting blast and the men filed into the building, guns drawn. One by one, the rooms of the building were cleared and secured; paper targets were peppered with bursts from automatic weapons. The “fugitive” was quickly apprehended.
It was then that a lanky young man with close-cropped red hair looked at his digital stopwatch and glared. “You guys can do it faster,” he said. “Let’s do it again from the beginning.”
That recent live-fire exercise took place at a training facility in central Israel. It was a Ya’mas dry run for an operation scheduled for later that week. (Ya’mas does not release details about the goals of its training missions, in part because operations can drag on for a long time, and can include as many as 30 forays per mission.) And although the image of the unimpressed drill sergeant ordering “Do it again from the beginning” is practically a cliché, for Israeli undercover operatives, it’s also a way of life.
Life inside an undercover squad is, according to one former Duvdevan officer, “a pressure cooker.” It takes a special type of soldier or policemen to volunteer for the units and an even stronger-willed individual to make it through the training. Most volunteers are ordinary 18-year-old conscripts looking for a challenge during their mandatory three years of military service. The army compiles extensive psychological profiles on all volunteers, and anyone not deemed 100 percent stable is rejected. According to published reports, the selection process weeds out 99 percent of the volunteers. (Any soldier who has had a family member hurt or killed in a terrorist attack is automatically disqualified.) Most of the volunteers come from kibbutzim or moshavim collective farms. Mental toughness is perhaps more important than physical prowess. “Any number of young kids have the physical wherewithal to parachute out of an airplane, run for 20 kilometers, or march up a mountain with 50 kilograms on [their] back[s],” an Israeli special operations officer explains. “But only a small minority of men have the mental stamina to learn how to assume a foreign identity, cultivate it into a believable act, and then combine these acting and intelligence skills … [to become] a proficient special operations commando.”
A former Duvdevan officer describes the mindset this way: “If I cannot pass myself [off] as one of them, I am not worth the costume I am issued. I have to … talk like them, look like them, eat like them, laugh like them, and even smell like them … If an old women passes me in street, I must respectfully move to the left, and if an old man passes me, I should greet him with the words ‘Salaam aleikum’ (Peace be unto you]. I must think in Arabic, react in Arabic, and ensure that the masquerade remains strong until the green light is given, my weapon is produced, and my true identity is finally compromised to the locals. If I get out of character for even one small second before the mission begins, I not only endanger myself and my team, but [also] the backup force and a lot of innocent Palestinians who could wind up in the middle of a firefight.”
Murphy’s Law—Friendly Fire
Murphy’s Law is as much a part of special operations as the pumping surges of adrenaline, the kick of fear, or the cold metal of a CAR-15 assault rifle. Being mistaken for a Palestinian by Israeli forces can have tragic consequences in the heat of battle: Many undercover operators have been too convincing for their own good.
One of the first and most notorious friendly-fire incidents involving an undercover unit occurred on July 10, 1992, in the village of Barta’a in the West Bank. A Duvdevan team, attempting to capture a Hamas squad meeting in a local mosque, accidentally killed one of its own—19-year-old Sgt. Eli Isha—when he was mistaken for an armed Arab teenager. The commander of the operation was court-martialed after the incident in a closed-door proceeding, and was stripped of his command. Other unit officers were disciplined as well.
But perhaps the worst friendly fire incident occurred on the night of Aug. 27, 2000, when three Duvdevan operators made a fatal mistake in Atzira Shamali, near Nablus. The Duvdevan undercover squad had operated in the village for weeks in the hope of capturing Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, a 28-year-old Hamas commander wanted for helping to plan a series of suicide bombings in Jerusalem—including the Sept. 4, 1997 attack on Ben Yehuda Street. Only on this night residents noticed the undercover operators moving through the village, and suspecting something was not quite right, they immediately phoned Abu Hanoud. Alerted to the impending assault, Abu Hanoud grabbed his AK-47 assault rifle, climbed to the roof of his house, and opened fire on the approaching soldiers who were clad in Arab garb. Three Duvdevan operators climbed to a rooftop of a building some 25 meters away and began firing at Abu Hanoud and his bodyguards. But by following their combat-driven instincts instead of the strictly outlined operational guidelines, the operators, who were dressed as Palestinians, had entered the line of fire of a developing fire-fight. All three were picked off by Duvdevan snipers who saw the kaffiyehs and mistook the Israelis for Hamas terrorists. Hanoud was wounded by a sniper’s bullet but managed to escape. (He was later treated in a Nablus hospital and then detained by Palestinian security. He is currently in Palestinian custody in Nablus.) Meanwhile, staff sergeants Liron Shavit, Niv Ya’akobi, and Ro’i Finsteiner-Even—all in their early 20s—were killed. And the entire incident was seen live on a large-screen TV inside IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv, transmitted in real time for commanding officers to follow.
Much of the criticism that followed, which played out in the press and on Israeli radio call-in shows, focused on the idea that 19- and 20-year-old soldiers are simply too young and inexperienced to carry out such delicate operations. But even after the funerals of the three Duvdevan agents, Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, the IDF chief of staff, said he remained committed to using such units against Hamas. In the heat of the political crisis, Mofaz still had his eye on the bigger picture. “I have no shadow of a doubt,” he said, “that this was a blow to plans by Abu Hanoud to carry out terror attacks in the near future.”
What Does the Future Hold?
Long before the Al-Aqsa Intifada, Israeli military and police planners were already meeting to consider the undercover units’ future. If cooperation between Palestinian police and intelligence services improved during the final stages of the negotiating process, the thinking went, and groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad lost their legitimacy in the territories, then the undercover units would become obsolete. With that in mind, the units began devoting their resources to other ends. The model came from the border guards, who created a number of regional special units to fight violent crime. These units, often commanded by veterans of elite units like Ya’mas, were designed to bring counterterrorist expertise to the day-to-day operations of crime fighting. “We knew how to blend into a hostile populace, initiate action, and … deal with a potential problem tactically,” noted “K,” a Border Guard commander who had supervised undercover units. “Why couldn’t that knowledge and that level of innovation be used to rid our streets of criminals and drug dealers?”
But that thinking changed in October, after the Palestinian rioting began and many of the new crime-fighting units were dispatched to handle Arab protests that broke out across Jaffe and the Galilee. During the first few days of the rioting, much of the undercover effort was being run by Ya’mas agents in Arab villages inside Israel. Ya’mas teams were dispatched in Umm al Fahm to help quell the civil unrest. Several Arab ringleaders, as well as others who were throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at police, were arrested. Later, after the October 12 incident in which a Palestinian mob lynched two IDF reservists in Ramallah, it was the undercover operatives working throughout the greater Ramallah area who used video footage to identify and apprehend eight suspects. And since Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat released many top Hamas officials who had been serving time in Palestinian jails, Israeli defense commanders, including Chief of Staff Mofaz, hint that the undercover units will resume their pivotal anti-terrorist role in the coming months.
In an interview with IDF Radio in late October, deputy defense minister Ephraim Sneh confirmed as much. “Instead of following a method which is somewhat mechanical,” Sneh warned, “we will use a method which uses our advantages, such as small elite units, and units trained in guerrilla warfare.” In November Duvdevan commandos operating with an elite border police unit and General Security Service agents rounded up 15 members of the Fatah movement’s Tanzim militia in a nighttime sweep through three West Bank villages. All 15 were suspected of shooting attacks against Israeli civilians.
Meanwhile, of course, the elite undercover operatives continue to train as if the very future of Israel depended on them. Back at the Ya’mas training ground, a team of operators perfect live-fire assaults from a moving vehicle. “Y,” the unit’s commander, juggles a cell phone, a field radio, and a constantly buzzing pager as he watches his men. In a mock Arab village, a white Peugeot and a beat-up Ford van pull up to an intersection. The van doors swing open and the men burst out, snatching a mannequin from in front of a building. As the vehicles speed away, the Peugeot’s passengers empty their M16 magazines into paper targets.
It’s a perfect snatch-and-grab—a mission these operatives might perform one day for real. Perhaps that’s why, even after nailing the exercise, their optimism is restrained.
“I hope that the day will come when units like this one are no longer needed,” says “B,” a unit marksman tending to his assault rifle. “Nothing would make me happier [than] for there to be peace and for this country not to have to send soldiers or cops into danger, dressed as something they are not, to capture men who have killed or are planning to kill.
“But until that happens, I have to remain focused and dedicated,” he adds, “because the stakes for both me and my unit, as well as for this country, are simply too high.”