Son of Hamas (22 page)

What a buildup they gave me. It was indeed an elaborate
game
.

The IDF was made to believe that I was a very high-profile terrorist who might disappear for good if they screwed up. So they did everything they could to make sure that didn’t happen. Undercover special forces dressed as Arabs, along with highly trained snipers, entered the area in Palestinian vehicles, stopped two minutes from the house, and waited for a signal. Heavy tanks were stationed fifteen minutes away on the territorial border. Helicopter gunships were ready to provide air cover, in case there was trouble with Palestinian street fighters.

Outside my father’s house, I sat in my car waiting for a call from the Shin Bet. When it came, I would have exactly sixty seconds to get away before the special forces surrounded the house. There was no margin for error on my end either.

I felt a stab of regret when I imagined how terrified my mother and little brothers and sisters would be within moments. As usual, they would have to pay the price for everything my father and I did.

I looked at my mother’s beautiful garden. She had gathered flowers from all over, taking cuttings from friends and family whenever she could. She cared for her flowers like they were her children.

“How many flowers do we need?” I sometimes teased her.

“Just a few more” was always the reply.

I recalled the time she pointed to one and said, “This plant is older than you. When you were a child, you broke its pot, but I saved it and it’s still alive.”

Would it still be alive a few minutes from now after arriving troops crushed it under their feet?

My cell phone rang.

Blood rushed to my head. My heart pounded. I started my engine and sped toward the center of town where I had established a new secret location. I was no longer pretending to be a fugitive. Soldiers who would rather kill me than arrest me were searching for me at that very moment. One minute after my departure, ten civilian cars with Palestinian plates slammed on their brakes. Israeli special forces surrounded the house, automatic weapons covering every door and window. The neighborhood was full of children, including my brother Naser. They stopped their soccer game and scattered, terrified.

As soon as the troops were in position, more than twenty tanks thundered in. Now the whole city knew something was going on. I could hear the massive diesel engines from my hideout. Hundreds of armed Palestinian militants rushed to my father’s house and surrounded the IDF. But they couldn’t shoot because children were still running for cover and because my family was inside.

With the arrival of the feda’iyeen, the helicopters were called in.

I suddenly wondered if I had been wrong to spare the suicide bombers. If I had just let the IDF drop a bomb on them, my family and our neighborhood would not be at risk now. If one of my siblings died in this chaos, I would never forgive myself.

To make certain our elaborate production became a global news event, I had tipped off Al-Jazeera that there was going to be an attack on the home of Sheikh Hassan Yousef. They all thought the Israelis had finally gotten my father, and they wanted to broadcast his arrest live. I imagined what their reaction would be when the loudspeakers started to crackle and the soldiers demanded that his oldest son, Mosab, come out with his hands up. As soon as I got to my apartment, I flipped on the TV and watched the drama along with the rest of the Arab world.

The army evacuated my family and questioned them. My mother told them that I had left one minute before they arrived. Of course, they didn’t believe her. They believed the Shin Bet, the ones who had staged the entire production and the only people besides myself who knew that the game had begun. When I didn’t surrender, they threatened to start shooting.

For a tense ten minutes, everyone waited to see whether I would come out and, if I did, whether I would emerge shooting or with my hands in the air. Then time was up. They opened fire, and more than two hundred bullets riddled my second-floor bedroom (and are still in the walls today). There was no more talking. They had obviously decided to kill me.

Suddenly, the shooting stopped. Moments later, a missile whistled through the air and blew up half our house. Soldiers rushed inside. I knew they were searching every room. No corpse and no hiding fugitive.

The IDF was embarrassed and enraged that I had slipped from their grasp. If they caught me now, Loai warned over the phone, they would shoot me on sight. For us, however, the operation was a success. No one had been hurt, and I had advanced to the most-wanted list. The whole city was talking about me. Overnight, I had become a dangerous terrorist.

For the next few months, I had three priorities: stay out of the army’s way, protect my dad, and continue to gather intelligence. In that order.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Defensive Shield

Spring 2002

The escalation in violence was dizzying.

Israelis were shot and stabbed and blown up. Palestinians were assassinated. Round and round it went, faster and faster. The international community tried in vain to pressure Israel.

“End the illegal occupation. . . . Stop the bombing of civilian areas, the assassinations, the unnecessary use of lethal force, the demolitions and the daily humiliation of ordinary Palestinians,” demanded UN secretary-general Kofi Annan in March 2002.
9

On the same day that we had arrested the four suicide bombers I had protected from assassination, European Union leaders called on both Israel and the Palestinians to rein in the violence. “There is no military solution to this conflict,” they said.
10

In 2002, Passover fell on March 27. In a dining room on the ground floor of the Park Hotel in Netanya, 250 guests had gathered for the traditional Seder meal.

A twenty-five-year-old Hamas operative named Abdel-Basset Odeh walked past the front security guard, past the registration desk in the lobby, and into the packed hall. Then he reached into his jacket.

The explosion killed 30 people and wounded about 140 others. Some were Holocaust survivors. Hamas claimed responsibility, saying that the purpose of the attack was to derail the Arab Summit being held in Beirut. Nevertheless, the next day, the Saudi-led Arab League announced that it had voted unanimously to recognize the State of Israel and normalize relations, as long as Israel agreed to withdraw to the 1967 boundaries, resolve the refugee problem, and establish an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. Receiving these concessions from Israel would have been a huge victory for our people if Hamas wasn’t still committed to its all-or-nothing idealism.

Recognizing this, Israel was planning its own extreme solution.

Two weeks earlier, officials had decided to test the waters for a major incursion into the Palestinian territories by invading the twin cities of Ramallah and Al-Bireh. Military analysts warned of high Israeli casualties. They needn’t have worried.

The IDF killed five Palestinians, imposed curfews, and occupied a few buildings. Huge D9 armored bulldozers also demolished several homes in Al-Amari refugee camp, including that of Wafa Idris, the first female suicide bomber, who had killed an eighty-one-year-old Israeli man and injured a hundred others outside a shoe store in Jerusalem back on January 27.

After the Park Hotel outrage, however, the test incursion became irrelevant. The Israeli cabinet gave the green light to launch an unprecedented operation, code-named Defensive Shield.

My phone rang. It was Loai.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“The whole IDF is gathering,” Loai said. “Tonight, we will have Saleh and every other fugitive in custody.”

“What do you mean?”

“We are going to reoccupy the entire West Bank and search every house and office building, however long it takes. Stay put. I’ll keep in touch.”

Wow,
I thought.
This is great! Maybe it will finally put an end to this mindless war.

Rumors flew throughout the West Bank. The Palestinian leadership knew something was up but had no idea what. People left work, clinics, and classrooms and went home to sit by their television sets, waiting for news. I had moved my father to a house owned by a couple of American citizens, and the Shin Bet assured me he would be safe there.

On March 29, I checked into the City Inn Hotel on Nablus Road in Al-Bireh, where the BBC, CNN, and the rest of the international media were housed. My father and I kept in touch with two-way radios.

The Shin Bet expected me to be at my hotel, eating chips and watching TV. But I didn’t want to miss anything so important. I wanted to be on top of everything, so I slung my M16 over my shoulder and headed out. Looking every bit the fugitive, I went to the top of the hill next to the Ramallah Library, from which I could see the southeast side of town where my father was. I figured I would be safe there, and I could run to the hotel as soon as I heard the tanks.

Around midnight, hundreds of Merkavas roared into the city. I hadn’t expected them to invade from every direction at once—or to be moving so quickly. Some of the streets were so narrow that the tank drivers had no choice but to climb over the tops of the cars. Other streets were wide enough, but the soldiers seemed to enjoy the screech of grating metal under their treads. Streets in the refugee camps were little more than paths between cinder-block houses that the tanks ground into gravel.

“Turn off your radio!” I told my father. “Stay down! Keep your head down!”

I had parked my father’s Audi at the curb. And I watched in horror as a tank tread crushed it to pulp. It wasn’t supposed to be there. I didn’t know what to do. I certainly couldn’t call Loai and ask him to stop the operation just because I had decided to play Rambo.

I ran toward the center of the city and ducked into an underground parking garage, just a few yards from an oncoming tank. No troops were on the ground yet; they were waiting for the Merkavas to secure the area. Suddenly, I had a terrifying realization. A number of Palestinian resistance factions had offices in the building directly above my head. I had taken refuge in a key target.

Tanks have no discernment. They can’t tell the difference between Shin Bet collaborators and terrorists, Christians and Muslims, armed fighters and unarmed civilians. And the kids inside those machines were just as scared as I was. All around me, guys who looked just like me fired AK-47s at the tanks.
Ping. Ping. Ping.
The bullets ricocheted like toys.
BOOM!
The tank shouted back, nearly bursting my eardrums.

Huge pieces of the buildings around us began to collapse into smoking heaps. Every cannon thump was a punch in the gut. Automatic weapons chattered and echoed off every wall. Another explosion. Blinding dust clouds. Flying chips and chunks of stone and metal.

I had to get out of there. But how?

Suddenly, a group of Fatah fighters ran into the garage and crouched around me. This wasn’t good. What if the soldiers came now? The feda’iyeen would open up on them. Would I shoot too? If so, at whom? If I didn’t shoot, they would kill me anyway. But I couldn’t kill anyone. At one time I might have been able to, but not anymore.

More fighters came, calling to others as they ran. Suddenly, everything seemed to stop. Nobody breathed.

IDF soldiers made their way cautiously into the garage. Closer. Whatever was going to happen would cut loose in seconds. Their torches searched for the whites of eyes or a reflection from a weapon. They listened. And we watched. Sweaty index fingers on both sides were poised on triggers.

Then the Red Sea parted.

Maybe they were afraid to go any deeper into the black, humid parking garage, or maybe they simply yearned for the familiar companionship of a tank. For whatever reason, the soldiers stopped, turned, and just walked out.

Once they were clear, I made my way upstairs and found a room where I could call Loai.

“Could you ask the IDF to back off a couple of blocks so I can get back to my hotel?”

“What! Where are you? Why aren’t you in the hotel?”

“I’m doing my job.”

“You’re nuts!”

There was an uncomfortable silence.

“Okay, we’ll see what we can do.”

It took a couple of hours to move the tanks and troops, who must have wondered why they had been pulled back. Once they moved, I nearly broke my leg jumping from one rooftop to another to return to my room. I shut the door, stripped, and stuffed my terrorist outfit and weapon into the air-conditioning duct.

Meanwhile, the house where my father was hiding was right in the center of the storm. The IDF searched inside every house around him, behind every building, and under every rock. But they had orders not to enter that particular house.

Inside, my father read his Qur’an and prayed. The owner of the house read the Qur’an and prayed. His wife read the Qur’an and prayed. Then, for no apparent reason, the troops left and began searching another area.

“You will not believe the miracle, Mosab!” my father said into my handset later. “It was unbelievable! They came. They searched every house around us, the entire neighborhood—except where we were. Allah be praised!”

You’re welcome,
I thought.

There had been nothing like Operation Defensive Shield since the Six-Day War. And this was only the beginning. Ramallah was the spearhead of the operation. Bethlehem, Jenin, and Nablus followed. While I had been running around dodging Israeli troops, the IDF had surrounded Yasser Arafat’s compound. Everything was locked down. Strict curfews were imposed.

On April 2, tanks and armored personnel carriers surrounded the Preventive Security Compound near our house in Betunia. Helicopter gunships chugged overhead. We knew the PA was hiding at least fifty wanted men at the compound, and the Shin Bet was frustrated because it was coming up empty-handed everywhere else.

The compound included four buildings, in addition to the four-story office building that housed Colonel Jibril Rajoub
11
and other security officials. The entire facility had been designed, built, and equipped by the CIA. The police were trained and armed by the CIA. The CIA even had offices there. Hundreds of heavily armed police were inside, along with a large number of prisoners, including Bilal Barghouti and others on Israel’s hit list. The Shin Bet and IDF were in a no-nonsense mood. Loudspeakers announced that the army would blow up Building One in five minutes and ordered everybody out.