The Ghost Warriors by Samuel M. Katz

Author:Samuel M. Katz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Proactive Deterrence

The Shin Bet agents working the phones at the Jerusalem field office knew that they weren’t going to get any sleep that night. Nobody was. It had already been a day full of Hatraot, or alerts, throughout the country. In the north, along the border with Lebanon, there were indications that Hezbollah was planning to attack an IDF patrol as it moved along the security fence. In Western Galilee, the Shin Bet received indications that a suicide bomber from the northern West Bank, probably Jenin, was being transported to one of the northern cities for a midday attack. And then the most serious alert permeated across the mobile phone networks. The pagers that linked just about every policeman, counterterrorist specialist, and Shin Bet agent did not stop buzzing: a three-man Hamas shooter team was going to target Jerusalem later that evening. It was Thursday night, August 30, 2001, nearly a year into the al-Aqsa intifada, and three weeks after the city’s sense of security had been shattered by the suicide bombing at the Sbarro pizzeria in the center of town that killed fifteen people and wounded more than one hundred.

The Shin Bet alert came late in the day. It was dinnertime: the summer sun had already begun to the set. Thursday was a night out for Jerusalem, and the city’s major arteries were already clogged with cars from the surrounding suburbs trying to find parking spots inside packed-to-capacity malls and outside the best restaurants and drinking haunts. Police units throughout the city were ordered to work double shifts; the midnight tour had already been paged and ordered to muster before sunset. Roadblocks and checkpoints were established along all roads leading into Jerusalem from the West Bank and the Palestinian areas to the east. Even the main road leading into the Israeli capital from Tel Aviv was locked down, and heavily armed police units searched every incoming vehicle, looking for something—and someone—suspicious.

The attack, the real-time intelligence indicated, was imminent. The Hamas gunmen had already left Ramallah. They had been dropped off at one of the invisible crossing points separating the Third World and the First and waiting for the means and methods by which they would cross into the confines of Jerusalem.

The Shin Bet assessed that the terrorists would use Beit Hanina—a neighborhood that was in the no-man’s-land of both the greater Jerusalem and greater Ramallah confines, only eight kilometers north of Jerusalem’s city center—as a springboard into Israel. Beit Hanina had been a popular staging area for Hamas in the past, and it was a turnstile for illegal day laborers, car thieves, and terrorists to simply walk to a bus stop or to the northernmost Jewish suburbs. Once the terrorists were inside Beit Hanina, and once they had access to a driver and a vehicle with the proper Israeli registration, they could reach any corner of the Israeli capital without fuss. A Border Guard special operations unit in Jerusalem called Matilan (the Hebrew acronym for “ambush, observation, interception,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.