Inside The War On Hamas

Monday, Sep. 22, 2003 By ROMESH RATNESAR/BEIT LID

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The order came in at midnight. The soldiers were at their base in Beit Lid, at the edge of the West Bank in northern Israel, preparing to launch an assault against wanted Palestinian militants. As the elite unit reviewed its plans, Israeli intelligence officials phoned the commanders with an updated mission. A suspected terrorist had been tracked to a residential building in Nablus, the densely populated Palestinian city known to Israelis as the West Bank's capital of terror. In the past year Israeli forces claim to have caught or killed 120 Palestinians with plans to head from Nablus to Israel to carry out a suicide bombing. Dan, 27, the burly commander of the reconnaissance unit of the Israeli army's Nahal Brigade, knew he had to strike fast. By the time his men could make it to Nablus, about 10 miles to the east, it would be nearly daybreak--and by then it might be too late. "If you're going after a suicide terrorist, you have to get to him immediately," he says. "Or else the next morning he'll be in Israel."

Israelis know well what it means when a terrorist gets through. A suicide bomber detonated himself at a bus stop near Tel Aviv last week, killing eight Israeli soldiers heading home from work. Five hours later, a second bomber exploded outside a cafe in a trendy district of Jerusalem, killing seven and wounding at least 30 others. Responsibility for the attacks was claimed by the terrorist group Hamas, which said it ordered the bombings in retaliation for Israel's attempted assassination a week earlier of the group's spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin. Few people on either side of the conflict had had much faith that Hamas would stick to the cease-fire it declared in June. But the newest attacks--and the Israeli Cabinet's decision to expel Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat "in a manner, and at a time, of its choosing" for failing to crack down on terrorism--raised the specter of a return to all-out war between Israelis and Palestinians.

A senior Israeli intelligence official says that, far from laying down its arms, Hamas used the cease-fire to reorganize, restock its bombmaking arsenal and plot a new wave of suicide attacks. Israel has responded by broadening its offensive against Hamas to include strikes aimed at killing the group's ideological and political leaders. After last week's bombings, Israeli warplanes struck the house of another Hamas leader, Mahmoud al-Zahar, killing al-Zahar's son Khaled and a bodyguard, and seriously injuring his wife and daughter. The air strikes have killed 12 suspected Hamas leaders in the past month, but the accompanying loss of innocent lives has stoked Palestinian fury toward Israel, a fact Hamas and other militant groups are now seeking to exploit. "The Israeli army is mobilizing the Palestinian masses against Israel," says a top Palestinian leader. "If you look at what the military is doing in the West Bank and Gaza, you will find it is making all efforts to close any window of hope."