Potent Explosives Fortify Palestinian Arsenal
By DOUGLAS FRANTZ
nytimes.com
TEL AVIV, April 6 — The
Palestinian militants battling
the Israeli Army in the West Bank
lack the basic weapons available
to the world's guerrilla armies:
antitank guns, missiles and land
mines that can cripple armored
vehicles.
But Israeli intelligence officials
say they have evidence that the
Palestinians have recently
augmented their limited arsenal
with significantly more powerful,
military-grade explosives that
appear to have been smuggled
into the territories.
Israeli officials said a forensic
examination of two massive
explosive charges used to cripple
Israeli tanks in the Gaza Strip in
February and March found traces
of RDX, an explosive that is
much more potent than the
rudimentary bombs previously
detonated by the Palestinians.
Officials said they did not know
where the Palestinians obtained
the military-grade explosives or how much they had.
Security officers said two suicide bombs — one on March
27 in Netanya that killed 26 people, another four days
later in Haifa that killed 15 — were also more expertly
built than previous devices and appeared to have more
powerful explosives. The bombs contained longer and
better-packed nails to increase deaths and injuries, a
senior officer said.
Israeli security authorities attributed the lethality of the
attacks in Netanya and Haifa to the improved explosives
and training provided by Hezbollah guerrillas, who have
vowed to help the Palestinians with weapons and
expertise.
The Islamic militant group Hamas claimed responsibility
for the attacks, and one of its leaders boasted this week
that his group had obtained military-grade explosives but
declined to provide details.
"Those blasts were more powerful and effective than
anything we have seen before," said an American official
in the region. "The Palestinians have learned some new
tricks."
Still, the Palestinians are badly overmatched in weapons.
The relative paucity of high-powered weapons discovered
in the Israeli incursions underscores the contention by
Palestinian militants that suicide bombers are their only
means of countering one of the world's best-equipped
armies, which uses heavily armored tanks and
American-supplied warplanes and helicopter gunships to
dominate the conflict.
The Palestinians' inability to obtain antitank missiles or
mines has been evident in recent days as column after
column of Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers
rolled into town squares and encircled the headquarters of
Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader.
An Israeli security cordon around the
Palestinian-controlled areas has limited the opportunities
for smuggling heavy arms, leaving Palestinian militants to
rely on local workshops and laboratories to produce
explosives and short-range rockets that have proven
largely ineffective against the Israeli military. The
explosives are typically less powerful than military
versions, and the so-called Qassam rockets made by local
machine shops are notoriously inaccurate and have limited
range.
The information about the weaponry is based on
interviews with Israeli officials and is consistent with
what witnesses have reported seeing and what the
Palestinians themselves have been saying.
Israeli officials said troops searching house by house in
the West Bank had found a dozen or so rudimentary
workshops for building bombs, relatively few heavy
machine guns and some rocket-propelled grenades, a
common weapon for attacking tanks and armored vehicles.
Israeli officials said the Palestinians had smuggled small
quantities of high-powered weapons into the country. They
said a search of Mr. Arafat's compound uncovered a
rocket-propelled grenade launcher and 43 bombs, three
Russian-made sniper rifles with telescopic sites and
assorted other weapons.
Officials said the raids also uncovered evidence that a top
Palestinian Authority official apparently controlled access
to the rocket-propelled grenades, according to a document
discovered in the compound and provided by Israeli
authorities to The New York Times.
The document was a receipt on the letterhead of Fuad
Shobaki, the chief financial officer for military operations
of the Palestine Liberation Organization and a member of
Mr. Arafat's inner circle. Dated Nov. 18, 2001, it was
signed by a Palestinian militia officer to acknowledge that
Mr. Shobaki had provided him with 20 RPG-7's, a version
of the antitank grenade.
Another document that the Israelis said was found in Mr.
Shobaki's office outlined an ambitious plan to build a
$100,000 workshop to make artillery rockets and mortars
for Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a militant wing of Mr.
Arafat's Fatah faction.
Israeli intelligence analysts are trying to use serial
numbers and seized documents to trace the origins of the
grenade launcher and other weapons from Mr. Arafat's
compound, officials said.
Israeli officials suspect that some small arms and
explosives have been smuggled into Israel through a
network of tunnels in Rafah, the divided city in the
southern Gaza Strip that straddles the border with Egypt,
the Israeli authorities said.
Israeli intelligence officials said Bedouins in the Sinai
desert sent weapons, drugs and other contraband through
the tunnels. The Israelis said the Egyptian authorities had
tried to limit the smuggling, but they acknowledged that the
task was difficult. "It's a wide-open desert," an Israeli
security official said.
The Israelis have tried to close the tunnels by knocking
down houses to create a no man's land in sections of Rafah
so that use of the tunnels cannot be hidden in houses.
United Nations and Western aid officials have condemned
razing houses.
Smuggling occurs over the borders with Lebanon and
Jordan, but the authorities in Israel and Jordan said the
amounts were believed to be small because of heavy
patrols.
Closer to home, Palestinians have obtained weapons from
Israeli criminals. A former Israeli security officer was
accused last year of selling Palestinians dozens of assault
rifles stolen from an arsenal on a kibbutz. But officials
said the sales did not include high-grade explosives or
heavy weapons.
Sea routes, often a means of obtaining larger weapons,
have been blocked fairly effectively. On Jan. 3, the
Israelis say, they prevented the Palestinian forces from
obtaining 50 tons of weapons when commandos boarded a
freighter, the Karine A. Israeli and American intelligence
officers said Mr. Shobaki was one of the Palestinian
officials who arranged the arms shipment with Iran.
The cargo contained weapons that the Palestinians have
been unable to obtain — antitank mines and missiles, two
tons of TNT and C-4 explosives, hundreds of
rocket-propelled grenades and launchers, and Katyusha
rockets that can reach most Israeli cities from the West
Bank and Gaza.
Israeli officials say the Palestinian militants have also
turned for help to Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based guerrilla
group financed and trained by Iran and Syria. The group's
leader recently called on all Arab countries to help arm
the Palestinians.
American and Israeli intelligence officers said members
of two Palestinian militant groups, Hamas and Islamic
Jihad, had been trained at Hezbollah camps in the Bekaa
Valley in Lebanon. That training, they said, showed up in
two particularly lethal suicide attacks late last month.
In the seaside resort of Netanya, a bomb nearly destroyed
the dining room of the Park Hotel. Four days later, a
similar blast blew the roof off a restaurant in Haifa.
Similarly, two huge blasts in Gaza were the first
successful attacks on Israeli tanks by Palestinians.
"We know they have RDX in Gaza," a senior officer said.
"We don't know how it got there." |
