Warriors of God (24 page)

The test of the cease-fire's durability came almost three weeks after Operation Accountability ended, when, on August 19, nine Israeli soldiers were killed in two roadside bomb attacks. The IDF, however, refrained from shelling areas facing the scene of the attack, opting instead for selective air strikes against a Hezbollah-operated radio station in the northern Bekaa Valley and the training area south of Janta village near the border with Syria.

The agreement had held—no Lebanese civilians were hurt, and no Katyusha rockets were fired into Israel. Yet the IDF still faced the same problem: how to blunt Hezbollah's deadly resistance campaign.

By late 1994, Israel had signed the Oslo Accords with the PLO that were supposed to lead to the gradual emergence of a Palestinian state, and
had struck a peace deal with Jordan. But a breakthrough with Syria, which would lead to a treaty with Lebanon and an end to the occupation of south Lebanon, remained elusive.

By now, it was evident to IDF commanders that a different approach was required in dealing with an enemy that was showing distinct and constant improvements on the battlefield. The structure of the occupation zone was too static, the troop deployment too cumbersome. Hilltop outposts were magnets for Hezbollah's mortars, rockets, and missiles. Routine foot patrols along roads and dirt tracks were desperately vulnerable to Hezbollah's increasingly sophisticated and powerful roadside bombs. The terrain of south Lebanon, with its rocky, steep-sided hills and narrow valley floors, relegated Israel's fleet of tanks to little more than mobile artillery platforms. At dusk, tanks would maneuver into forward positions overlooking the front line, using their thermal imaging sights to scan for intruders, before slinking back to better protected compounds at dawn.

“We were a strong army, but we didn't have the right capabilities for [combating] guerrilla warfare,” Kaplinsky, the Golani Brigade commander, told me. “Hezbollah is a learning organization. They would debrief after every operation. They had very good intelligence capabilities. We were playing into their hands in those days. We were operating in a heavy and high-intensity tactical manner, and they were studying us.”

In February 1995, Lieutenant General Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, the IDF chief of staff, asked Kaplinsky to put together a new counterguerrilla unit under the command of the Golani Brigade in the Northern Command. The new unit was called Egoz, the Hebrew acronym for Anti-Guerrilla Micro-Warfare. While there were several other elite special forces units in the Israeli army, some of them regularly deployed in south Lebanon, Egoz was the only unit to be trained specifically in guerrilla warfare tactics to fight Hezbollah. “Shahak called me and said, ‘You've got three months to build a special unit,' ” Kaplinsky recalls. “We took soldiers from all infantry units with good commanders, people with open minds. We trained them in completely new tactics and in areas that resembled south Lebanon.”

The Egoz volunteers, based at Kiryat Tivon near Haifa, were given
weeks of clandestine training to prepare them for combat in the dense undergrowth and steep mountains and hills of southern Lebanon. The first recruits were drawn mainly from other special forces units, such as Sayeret Matkal, the Paratroop Reconnaissance Battalion, and Shayetet 13, the Israeli equivalent of the U.S. Navy SEALs or the Royal Navy's Special Boat Service. Already schooled in special operations, the first intake of Egoz recruits were ready for action in a relatively short period of time. Today, Egoz recruits undergo a fourteen-month training period that includes specialized courses in parachuting, airborne insertions, and navigation, with an emphasis on camouflage and fieldcraft.

The top secret company-sized unit became operational in July 1995 and was soon engaged in missions in the zone and beyond. But the IDF fatality count continued to rise. In 1995, twenty-three soldiers were killed in south Lebanon, two more than in the previous year, and another ninety-nine were wounded. Morale was sinking among troops serving in the zone, reminiscent of the fears experienced by an earlier generation of Israeli soldiers in south Lebanon before the 1985 pullback to the border zone. In early 1995, an Israeli paratrooper unit was disbanded after several of its soldiers asked their commander for an alternative mission on learning that they were to be sent to Lebanon for one last tour of duty before ending their compulsory service in the IDF. The furious commander told the soldiers that they were “not worth the spit of a dead monkey” and split up the unit.
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By fall 1995, the Israeli-Syrian peace track had reached an impasse. On November 4, Yitzhak Rabin was shot dead by a Jewish extremist as he emerged from a peace rally in Tel Aviv. Rabin was replaced by Shimon Peres, and the peace negotiations with Syria resumed the following month. Peres hoped that a deal could be reached with Syria before the next general election in Israel, scheduled for October 1996. The looming election was regarded as an opportunity for Israel to decide whether it wished to continue pursuing regional peace under Peres or opt for a
more cautious and less yielding approach under Peres's rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud Party.

The ruling Labor Party was riding high in the polls, buoyed by sympathy over Rabin's assassination, but Peres, a career politician who was more comfortable with negotiation, dialogue, and deal making than striking military poses, was keenly aware that the Israeli public was uncertain whether he was sufficiently robust on national security. After a top Hamas bomb maker was assassinated in January 1996, Israel was rocked by four deadly suicide bomb attacks in eight days that left almost sixty Israelis dead and many more wounded. The Labor Party's lead in the polls began to slip as a furious and frightened electorate blamed Peres for failing to stop the bombings. To compound Peres's woes, the ever-cautious Assad clearly was not going to be hurried into a peace deal with Israel just to save the Israeli premier's electoral skin. While Assad was willing to keep the talks going with the Israelis, he spurned a request by Peres for a summit between the two leaders. In umbrage, Peres brought forward the date of the election to May and postponed further peace moves with Syria until after the polls.

The embattled Israeli premier was also facing serious difficulties in south Lebanon. Hezbollah stepped up operations in mid-February and March, with UNIFIL recording more than two hundred attacks for the first three months of the year, including two simultaneous assaults against multiple IDF and SLA positions. IDF casualties climbed significantly in March in a series of ambushes. On March 4, four Israeli soldiers were killed and nine wounded while chasing a squad of Hezbollah fighters across the central sector of the zone. The Hezbollah team had ambushed the IDF patrol near the border. The Israelis gave chase, but the fleeing Hezbollah men led the soldiers into a cluster of roadside bombs detonated by another squad lying in wait.

Another soldier died and twelve more were wounded in separate IED ambushes in the following days. In mid-March, Ali Asmar, a fresh-faced Hezbollah fighter, accompanied by two comrades, slipped into the central sector of the zone and worked his way to the edge of Rubb Thalatheen village near the border. Asmar climbed into a well to hide while his two colleagues retreated out of the zone. Three days later,
Asmar, known within Hezbollah circles as Al-Shaheed al-Ammar, the Martyr of the Moon, for his round, youthful face, emerged from the well and blew himself up beside a passing IDF convoy, killing an officer.

On March 30, the IDF fired an antitank missile at three Lebanese workers repairing a water tower in the village of Yater, killing two of them. Hezbollah responded by firing more than twenty rockets into Israel. Peres admitted the next day that the IDF action had been a “mistake,” but the damage was done, and it was evident from the surge in IDF casualties that Hezbollah and the Israelis were heading for another showdown.

“It was always a matter of statistics for me,” recalls Timur Goksel, UNIFIL's veteran senior adviser, who had been watching developments in south Lebanon with growing unease. “Whenever there was an unusually heavy number of [IDF] casualties that attracted attention to Israel or the Israeli presence in Lebanon, and these casualties occurred in a short period of time, there was always the possibility that the Israelis would react very heavily.… Too many casualties in a short period of time meant big trouble.”

FOUR
 

BRAASHEET, south Lebanon
—It was early evening, and a chill wind ruffled sixteen-year-old Mazen Farhat's sandy-colored hair as he trudged up the narrow, winding lane behind his parents' house.

Mazen's seven-year-old brother, Ibrahim, and his cousin Mohammed, down from Beirut for the spring holidays, followed a few paces behind. There were few people about, just a handful of farmers planting tobacco seedlings in the stony chocolate-colored soil. A compound defended by SLA militiamen was perched on a steep hill south of Braasheet, dominating the village like a scruffy medieval castle.

As the youngsters passed alongside a low stone wall, Mazen noticed a pale gray rock lying beside the road. He knew the lane intimately, and he was certain that the rock hadn't been there a few days ago.

Despite his youth, Mazen, like all residents of frontline villages, was well aware of “rock bombs”—those cunningly disguised IEDs used by both Hezbollah and the Israelis in which the explosive charge was hidden inside a fiberglass shell spray-painted to match the local geology.

Mohammed stood beside the road and urinated lazily against the stone wall as his cousin bent over to take a closer look at the rock.

Suddenly, Mazen realized what he was looking at. “Oh, mother,” he wailed. And the bomb exploded.

Mazen's heavily pregnant mother, Amal, was chatting with friends in the living room of her house, less than two hundred yards from where the three boys had stopped to examine the strange rock. When Amal heard the blast, she was filled with an awful premonition that her children were involved. She ran screaming from the house and followed a crowd of people to the scene of the explosion.

The blast had killed Mazen instantly and thrown his body several feet into the adjacent field, far enough that it took several minutes for the villagers to find him. Ibrahim, who had been standing just a yard or two behind his older brother, was knocked unconscious by the explosion. His clothes were shredded, his body soaked in blood, and his flesh peppered with shrapnel.

“He looked like a sieve,” his mother later recalled.

Mohammed was also seriously injured. The explosion tore open the seven-year-old boy's stomach, spilling his intestines onto the ground.

The local residents had no doubt who was responsible for the bombing. Some farmers who had been working in their fields at the southern edge of the village when the bomb exploded said they had heard the faint sound of cheering coming from the SLA position on the hill outside Braasheet. The militiamen in the compound were hidden from the bomb site by a ridge and could not have seen what happened. Nonetheless, it seemed they knew what the sound of the blast entailed.

Ordnance officers from the Irish UNIFIL battalion discovered that the explosion was in fact caused by four bombs, not one—serially linked explosive charges packed with steel ball bearings and fitted with antitampering mechanisms, hidden beneath fiberglass “rocks.”
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The bombs were typical antipersonnel charges employed by both Hezbollah and the Israeli army.

The Israelis denied responsibility for the bombing. A Hezbollah “explosives specialist” appeared on the group's Al-Manar television channel the next day, displaying fragments of the four bombs. He said that the
wiring, the Israeli-manufactured battery, and parts of an antenna proved the bomb was the handiwork of the Israelis.

Shortly after seven o'clock the next morning, Hezbollah fired twenty-five Katyusha rockets across the border, striking the town of Kiryat Shemona. Seven Israeli civilians were wounded, one of them seriously. Hours later, an Israeli soldier was killed and three others wounded when Hezbollah fighters pounded an IDF compound with mortar shells.

With northern Israel struck by Hezbollah rockets twice in two weeks, Peres's attempts to boost his security credentials in the run-up to the Israeli election slated for the end of May were looking increasingly frail. The rival Likud Party seized upon his apparent inability to stem the cross-border rocket fire, hammering home the fact that the dovish prime minister was weak on security.