The Work Of Assassins

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The Palestinian hits are fewer in number--so far less than half a dozen--but they evince a kind of street justice that is particularly brutal. And just as Israel's high-tech attacks are designed to intimidate and scare, the low-tech snatch-and-grab killings like the one that took Jalila Shahine's son are meant to send a message of their own: Don't inform to the Israelis. In late November, longtime collaborator Kassem Khleif was killed in a drive-by shooting as he left a gym. The word quickly got around his hometown of Bethlehem, where his pro-Israeli sympathies were well known. This rough Palestinian punishment isn't enforced just on the street. Palestinian courts offer quick trials and hangings for arrested collaborators.

For Israeli military planners, the assassination game is so important that they devote many of their most high-tech resources to the operation. Through a network of antennas across the West Bank, the Shin Bet domestic-security service can ascertain the location of a cellular phone's user to within a few yards. Drones flying almost a mile high zoom in on targets to give a live video feed to the Shin Bet's operations room in a nondescript gray building in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Aviv. The drone can follow a target as he travels, building a thick intelligence dossier on his movements or relaying to snipers on the ground that their mark is approaching. The Shin Bet has a list of names of about 100 potential targets in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And it has the army's finest marksmen to call upon when it decides to strike.

Abu Sway was gunned down by a special air-force unit called Shaldag, Hebrew for Kingfisher. Shaldag is one of a handful of elite units that take the cream of Israel's young fighters. They're trained to sit camouflaged in their hideouts for as long as a day without moving. As commandos, they are also able to memorize maps and move across open country with pinpoint accuracy. The Israeli equivalent of the American Navy SEALS, Shayetet 13, has also been involved. Last week Shayetet 13 snipers took out the most senior official so far when they shot dentist Thabet Thabet, the head of Yasser Arafat's Fatah Party in the West Bank town of Tulkarem.

Israel's best weapon, however, remains Palestinian collaborators. When Mohammad Nawawra was arrested in 1990 for throwing a Molotov cocktail at an Israeli army jeep, Shin Bet agents persuaded him to work for them. Over subsequent years, he supplied information on car thieves and extremist preachers in mosques. By last fall he was receiving about $250 a month for his services. Then his Shin Bet contact asked him to start watching Hussein Abyat, an officer in General Intelligence, an arm of the Palestinian Authority. On Nov. 9, Nawawra called in a series of reports to the Shin Bet. In the last call, he said Abyat was headed toward the town of Beit Sahour in his hunter-green Mitsubishi pickup truck. Nawawra saw an Apache helicopter circling, then the two rockets that killed Abyat as he drove.