Excerpts from an article about Israeli targeting killings.
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In Israel, leaders struggle with targeted killings
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It was an operation, for Yaalon, that had evolved from an earlier meeting with an earlier prime minister. In the fall of 2000, when Palestinian-Israeli violence erupted, Yaalon approached Prime Minister Ehud Barak with an idea. Instead of imposing restrictions on all Palestinians, they should launch "surgical operations" against terrorists. Yaalon suggested setting up a joint command post for Shin Bet and the military.
"It wasn't something new -- we were in this business," Barak said in an interview. In 1973, in Beirut, wearing high heels and a woman's wig, Barak helped gun down three of the terrorists who murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. "I was a brunette, I had a strawberry blonde behind me," Barak said, with a small smile.
As military chief of staff in the early 1990s, Barak had organized undercover units called "Cherry" and "Samson," soldiers who dressed like Arabs and killed Palestinians suspected of violence.
When Barak reactivated targeted killings in 2000, he said, "the first were urgent, but after, I said, 'We need rules.' " An aide exhumed four typed pages in a dusty, plastic sleeve, Barak said. They were the rules of engagement for the avengers of the 1972 Munich massacre.
Barak also secretly asked Daniel Reisner, a legal adviser to Arab-Israeli peace talks, to determine whether targeted killings were legal. Reisner agonized for six weeks. "It was a feeling of -- what on Earth has happened?" Reisner recalled. "Instead of two states living amicably side by side, I have to write opinions on how and when we kill each other."
Reisner concluded it was legal, with six conditions: that arrest is impossible; that targets are combatants; that senior cabinet members approve each attack; that civilian casualties are minimized; that operations are limited to areas not under Israeli control; and that targets are identified as a future threat. Unlike prison sentences, targeted killing cannot be meted out as punishment for past behavior, Reisner said. In 2002, a military panel established that targeting cannot be for revenge, but only for deterrence. A panelist said it took six months and 20 meetings to reach that conclusion.
"It's not an eye for an eye," Dichter said. "It's having him for lunch before he has you for dinner."
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...Reisner, the legal expert, was often consulted at the meetings, which he described as "very, very trying. Especially when I said it's okay. I'd go back to my office and ask my deputy, 'Do you agree?' It's a frightening process to be involved in, sitting in a room and talking about killing someone. It's enough to make your skin crawl."
But once the evidence was presented, Reisner said, when they identified the cafe the terrorist was planning to blow up, or the movie theater he hoped to destroy, "you're reminded of what you're trying to avoid."
Complicated process
When the prime minister approves a target -- a requirement that can take months -- the name is transferred from the Notebook to a shortlist typed on a laminated card. Commanders carry the card in their pockets, along with bus passes and keys. Each target is assigned a file, with instructions on when and where he can be killed. Specialists mark up maps -- green lines for open roads where killings minimize civilian risk, red lines for congested areas to be avoided, Yaalon said. An operation can take 200 people, thousands of man hours, and cost $1 million, Halutz said.
When a target is hit, Reisner said, the feeling is "complicated."
Not for Avi Dichter. "After each success, the only thought is, 'Okay, who's next?' We really have a bottleneck," the former Shin Bet chief said. One time they completed a killing at 5:30 a.m. "I said, 'What are we going to do for the rest of the day?' Nothing limits Hamas attacks, except terrorists still prefer their heads attached to their shoulders. If the M-16 delivers the message, the F-16 delivers it better."
On Saturday morning, Sept. 6, 2003, six F-16s were waiting off the coast of Gaza. Mofaz, the defense minister, sat in his office and changed the channel on his TV from CNN to live footage of Gaza from a reconnaissance drone. By noon, several Hamas leaders had arrived at the home of Marwan Abu Ras, a religion professor who was also a Hamas activist. The Israeli cameras zoomed in to catch the details.
"Some came on foot, some came by car, some parked far away and walked," Mofaz recalled. "They covered their faces with kaffiyehs and wore flowing clothes so they'd be hard to track."
A Shin Bet agent in the command center called out the identities of the men. "It was the 'Who's Who' of Hamas," said Gabi Ashkenazi, then Yaalon's deputy. "People we'd been hunting for years."
"It got intense," Yaalon recalled. "The reports -- 'Here comes Mohammed Deif.' 'Here comes Adnan al-Ghoul.' 'Here comes Ismail Haniyeh.' They said the names, I pictured each one, and I pictured blown-up buses and disco bombings, and shootings, murders of children, and kidnapped soldiers."
Gallant, the prime minister's adviser, called Sharon at his ranch and told him about the extraordinary gathering. "We're talking about people responsible for killing hundreds of Israelis," Gallant said. "They're planning on killing hundreds more."
Sharon was setting up for his grandson's sixth birthday party. He asked, "Are the planes ready?"
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A half-ton bomb wouldn't finish the job, the air force chief said. A one-ton bomb would blow out the neighboring apartment building, which was filled with dozens of families.
Immediately, Dichter and Yaalon began to argue. Dichter favored the heavy bomb; Yaalon wanted to abort the operation. They both had worked for decades in counter-terrorism, had served in the same secret commando unit and had, as Dichter put it, "traveled together without passports deep into Arab lands."
But they had emerged with different conclusions. For Dichter, "the barrel of terrorism has a bottom." If you captured or killed enough terrorists, Dichter believed, the problem would be solved. "They deserved a bomb that would send the dream team to hell," Dichter said. "I said, 'If we miss this opportunity, more Israelis will die.' "
Yaalon disagreed: "We won't get to the bottom of the barrel by killing terrorists. We'll get there through education. Dichter thinks we'll kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. That's it -- we've won. I don't accept that."
While Yaalon said the army had to consider the support of the Israeli public -- unlikely to favor civilian deaths -- and international legitimacy, Dichter said that from an operational point of view, a one-ton bomb made sense. "There is no fair fight against terrorists," Dichter said. "Never has been. Never will be."
The debate lasted for hours, observers said, and grew louder and larger. The prime minister's adviser, Gallant, sided with Dichter. The defense minister, Mofaz, sided with Yaalon. Dichter recalled: "If you didn't have a strong heart, you'd have a heart attack."
"How can we look in the eyes of our pilots if they kill innocent people?" Yaalon argued.
"And if the terrorists walk out alive, and tomorrow another bus explodes, how do we explain it to our people?" Dichter said.
It was a familiar debate. How many civilian casualties were acceptable? The mathematician whom the military had enlisted had failed to produce a formula. Reisner, who had stipulated that targeted killing was legal "only if all is done to minimize civilian casualties," served on a seven-member committee that also failed to agree on a standard they could use. The numbers the men had suggested averaged 3.14 civilian deaths per dead terrorist, Reisner recalled. If the civilians were children, the figure was smaller.
More than half of all targeted operations have been called off, a senior military source said, because of danger to noncombatants. The current air force chief, Maj. Gen. Elyezer Shkedy, said in an interview that collateral damage had been decreasing from one civilian death per assassination in 2002 to one civilian death for every 25 terrorists killed in 2005. One reason was technology, Yaalon said. At first, Apache helicopters fired Hellfire antitank missiles, he said. Yaalon asked Rafael Armament Development Authority, a Defense Ministry affiliate, to manufacture smaller warheads.
"A person isn't a tank," said Avi Galor of Rafael, who supervises a team that is miniaturizing missiles. Rafael is developing "the Firefly," a warhead the size of a soda bottle. Galor said, "We want to kill terrorists -- and not little girls, and it's on CNN, and you can't explain it."
Israel Aircraft Industries, which makes spy drones, is trying to "close the sensor-to-shooter chain," or to compress the relay time, said a manager at the firm, Ofer Haruvi. He added, "Mistakes happen because the commander says shoot, and then the situation changes."
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Mofaz's military secretary, Brig. Gen. Michael Herzog, was phoning in reports to the defense minister.
"We did it -- a direct hit," Herzog told him.
A minute later, Herzog called again: "The results are unclear."
A minute later: "It seems people escaped alive."
Another " Whoa !" filled the war room, one of disappointment.
Dichter recalled: "We saw people running out of the house faster than Olympic runners."
For Abu Ras, the Hamas leader whose home had been bombed, "it felt like an earthquake. A big, black smoke," he said in an interview. His guests had sat down to lunch. "I was so happy to host them," Abu Ras said. "What was our crime? I'm an ordinary citizen, not a terrorist. We have no terrorists among the Palestinian people."
Haniyeh was serving rice to Yassin. Then an explosion shook the room, and Yassin looked at the ceiling. "Why all this dust? Where is it coming from?" said Yassin, who was lightly wounded in his hand along with another Hamas member and 12 neighbors.
Haniyeh laughed bitterly, "We are hit, Sheik."
But the men were gathered on the ground floor of the house. The quarter-ton bomb destroyed only the third floor. Abu Ras's wife and four children, on the second floor, survived. And the Hamas leadership was safe.
'We blew it'
That evening, Yaalon's deputy, Ashkenazi, came home and slammed the door. He walked into the kitchen, he recalled. He kicked the wall.
"What happened?" his wife said, staring at him.
What happened, according to Gallant, the prime minister's adviser, was simple: "We blew it. You either attack or you don't."
Mofaz, the defense minister, recalled a colleague needling him that evening. "Boy, you made a mistake," the colleague said. Mofaz retorted: "We'll get the terrorists later, better not to kill 20 kids."
Today, Mofaz is sidelined, serving as the minister of transportation. Sharon suffered a stroke and lies in a coma. Gallant is a major general, commander of Israel's southern sector, directing operations in Gaza.
The Israelis did kill Ghoul, in October 2004, and Yassin, in March 2004 -- "a missile in his lap," said an Israeli general. Abu Ras, the Hamas host, bought a new home. In July, Deif, the master bombmaker, survived another attack. In February, Haniyeh was elected prime minister of the Palestinian Authority.
"When I see Haniyeh, I ask myself, how is he alive? He shouldn't be there," said Halutz, the former air force chief. Today, Halutz serves as Israel's top military commander.
"Three years later, I'd say we should have used the heaviest bomb to ensure this leadership would be eliminated, and to save Palestinian and Israeli lives," Halutz said. At the time though, Halutz thought they had made the moral decision.
"Three moral successes don't equal one operational success," Dichter said, rapping his desk with his wedding ring. "We failed. Period." Since Dichter left Shin Bet, he has risen in politics, and is serving as internal security minister. Hamas rockets have struck his home town near Gaza.
Yaalon, the chief of staff in 2003, is reportedly considering joining the Likud party, as a candidate for defense minister. He was bumped from his military post, observers say, among other reasons, for stating publicly that he thought Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 would lead to another war.
He is haunted by Sept. 6, 2003, especially now, given Hamas's rise to power.
The night of the failed operation, Yaalon sat with his wife watching the news, drinking mint tea from their garden. "We didn't talk about it. It was a very bad weekend," Yaalon said. "Until today I'm not sure if I was right. I thought about it again, and again, and again. All day long."
Yaalon had wanted to make the right decision, to "save the state of Israel," as his son had said. At midnight on Sept. 6, he recalled, he went to brush his teeth, and took a long, painful look at himself in the mirror. Then he watched the last newscast: Hamas supporters were marching, demanding revenge.
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