Warriors of God (31 page)

Yet it still remains unclear what the Israelis were doing in Ansariyah. Nasrallah admitted in his press conference that the purpose of the mission was still a mystery to Hezbollah.

Local residents claimed that a senior Hezbollah official used to spend some nights in the village. Could the Israelis have intended to kidnap or kill him? That possibility was lent some support by Amiram Levine, the former head of the IDF's Northern Command, who told me that the intended target was a Hezbollah military commander.

There may yet be more to the Ansariyah story that Hezbollah prefers to keep under wraps. But Hezbollah's official view is that the Israelis had no particular target in mind, contrary to speculation at the time. Instead, the Israeli assault fell within the prevailing policy of deep-penetration commando raids, similar to the one at Kfour, to kill resistance fighters and to signal to Hezbollah's leadership that Israel could operate where it pleased.

“The Israelis were trying to spread panic in the souls of the resistance fighters,” Sheikh Naim Qassem told me in July 2009. “The number of killed Hezbollah fighters and their individual status within the organization was not as important as the fact that the Israelis could say they had infiltrated into the depths of the resistance.

“They had a plan to do [IED] set-up operations in several places,” Qassem added. “After Ansariyah, the whole project just collapsed.”

Not only was the Ansariyah ambush a military success, but Hezbollah also reaped a propaganda coup over Israel's mix-up of body parts belonging to the slain naval commandos.

In July 1998, after months of negotiations brokered by a German intelligence officer, a deal was concluded in which Ilya's remains were exchanged for the bodies of forty resistance fighters and sixty Lebanese detainees. Among the freed prisoners was Ramzi Nohra. The wily double agent returned to Ibl es-Saqi for a few days before being dragged from his home by SLA intelligence agents and expelled from the occupation zone.

Sergeant Ilya's remains were conveyed to Israel via the International Committee for the Red Cross, and here the story could have ended. But Hezbollah had another trick up its sleeve.

Questions were posed on its website, addressed to the Israeli public. The first queried the findings of the two Israeli inquiries into the Ansariyah debacle. Hezbollah's teasing questions about how the group could have known the commandos were coming led to public pressure on the Israeli government to convene a third commission of inquiry. Then Hezbollah raised questions about the body parts it had returned to Israel. Hezbollah had always said that the remains included body parts from two soldiers apart from Ilya, adding that they had DNA evidence. But the Israeli authorities had kept that gruesome fact quiet, creating the impression to the Israeli public and the grieving relatives of the dead commandos that the only missing soldier from Ansariyah was Ilya and that the other eleven soldiers had been buried intact.

Hezbollah then posted on the website grisly photographs of the body parts, which included five feet. “How can one man have five legs?” taunted the caption. “Your army is concealing the facts. They not only
disrespect your sons when they are alive by sending them to certain death, they also disrespect them after they are dead. The bodies of your sons are incomplete and mixed up with pieces of others.”

The propaganda ploy sparked an uproar in Israel, as a deeply embarrassed IDF was forced to admit that it had opened up the graves of two soldiers killed at Ansariyah to add the new body parts recovered in the swap.

Suddenly, families of the dead soldiers were demanding autopsies and DNA tests to check that the remains in the graves were really their relatives and not a mishmash of different bodies.

The Ansariyah episode encapsulated Hezbollah's increasingly multidimensional and skillful approach to the conflict with Israel. Through a combination of resourceful intelligence work, battlefield prowess, and deft propaganda, Hezbollah had produced a highly effective result that forced Israel to readjust its tactics once more. Although Israel continued to employ special forces units inside the zone and along its edges until its troop withdrawal in 2000, the Ansariyah raid was the last deep-penetration operation into Lebanon.

The fall of 1997 was a miserable period for the Israelis in south Lebanon. Even apparent achievements fell flat. On September 12, exactly one week after Ansariyah, Hadi Nasrallah, the eighteen-year-old eldest son of the Hezbollah leader, was killed along with two comrades in a clash with an Egoz unit on the edge of the zone. His corpse was recovered from the field and brought to Israeli headquarters in Marjayoun, where local reporters filmed it lying in a corridor as grinning SLA militiamen stood by.

But the outpouring of public sympathy in Lebanon for Nasrallah boosted his credibility even further. Rafik Hariri, who had also lost a son, was deeply moved by Hadi Nasrallah's death. “Rafik Hariri used to tell me that all the political leaders in Lebanon usually provide their kids nice cars, send them to the best universities, and prepare them to inherit their political roles. And only Hassan Nasrallah sends his son to be a
martyr. He said he had never met anyone like that before. ‘Nasrallah is a man I can trust,' he used to say,” recalls Mustafa Nasr, Hariri's interlocutor with Hezbollah.

Nasrallah refused to accept condolences, instead telling supporters to congratulate him on Hadi's “martyrdom.” At a ceremony a week later, Nasrallah announced that Hezbollah was forming a new resistance unit, the Saraya Muqawama al-Lubnaniyya, or Lebanese Resistance Brigades, open to all volunteers regardless of religion. The unit was a response to the number of Lebanese clamoring to join the resistance, Nasrallah said. The new recruits would be trained and guided by regular Hezbollah cadres, he added, after which they would carry out operations against the Israelis in the south. Phone numbers were printed in Lebanese newspapers that hopeful recruits could call for instructions on how to join.

To demonstrate that it remained unbowed by Hadi Nasrallah's death, Hezbollah upped the tempo in the following week. On September 14, a pair of Israeli soldiers were killed by a large roadside bomb, and four days later, Hezbollah launched a simultaneous multipronged dawn attack against twenty-five Israeli and SLA outposts stretching the length of the occupation zone. The assault, involving almost two hundred fighters, began at 7:00
A.M.
precisely when Hezbollah mortar and rocket batteries opened fire toward Israeli and SLA positions stretching from the Mediterranean to the hills west of Mount Hermon. As the fighting raged along the front line, a fighter squinted through the rubber-lined optic sight of an AT-4 Spigot antitank missile, an improved version of the AT-3 Sagger, and took careful aim at the rectangular lines of a Merkava Mark 2 tank nestled near an Israeli outpost in Rihan village. On firing, the missile streaked toward its target while the operator kept the sight aimed steadily at the side of the tank. The wire-guided missile slammed into the side of the Merkava, the shaped-charge warhead burning through the armor plating and spraying its molten copper plasma jet inside, killing the tank's commander.

It was the first time that Hezbollah had successfully penetrated the armor of a Merkava tank with an antitank missile. The Merkava's Israeli manufacturers marketed the tank as the safest in the world, thanks to a
dense layer of reactive armor designed to explode antitank warheads before the missiles could reach the steel skin. Hezbollah's newfound ability to blast missiles through the tank's armor sent the Merkava's designers hurrying back to the drawing board to check for the “weak point” that Nasrallah boasted his fighters had found.

The destruction of the Merkava was the result of a steady improvement in Hezbollah's antitank skills. Hezbollah received the Spigot missile from Iran in 1995. Although the warhead was smaller than that of the AT-3, its velocity was greater, and, crucially, its guidance system allowed for much greater accuracy. The introduction of the AT-4 into south Lebanon forced the Israelis to improve the armor of some tanks and replace others with the top-of-the-line Merkava.

Hezbollah built a team specialized in antiarmor skills, sending them to training camps in Syria and Iran for intensive courses in which they improved their accuracy against life-sized mock-ups of Merkava tanks. They were taught to aim for the same point on a tank using two or more missiles in succession. The idea was to blast off the layers of reactive armor, exposing the steel skin to follow-up missiles. The technique was refined over the years as Hezbollah learned to “swarm” Israeli armored vehicles with missiles.

In the weeks that followed the fatal strike against the Merkava in Rihan in September, two more Merkava Mark 2 tanks were destroyed by Hezbollah's antitank missiles. “Our fighters transformed the Merkava tank into scrap metal. We know all the tank's secrets, and it is now an easy target,” said Qawq, Hezbollah's southern commander, boasting that the resistance had “ended the myth of the Merkava.”

The AT-4 Spigot was not the only second-generation antitank missile employed by Hezbollah. It was also using the U.S.-made TOW missile, which, ironically, had been delivered by Israel to Iran as part of the arms-for-hostages affair during the 1980s. The Iranians had transferred the TOWs to Hezbollah, and the missiles were now being returned to the Israelis on the battlefields of southern Lebanon.

The disabling attacks against the Merkavas in 1997 could not have been more ill-timed for Israel. The Israeli government was attempting to sell to Turkey a fleet of Merkava Mark 3s as part of a multi-billion-dollar
arms deal. Although the tanks hit by Hezbollah were the earlier, Mark 2 version, the Mark 3, which had entered service in 1990, differed from its predecessor only in the size of engine, the caliber of the main gun, and the fire control system. Both tanks shared the same armor protection.
⁴

To compound Israel's misery in south Lebanon, Hezbollah's intelligence penetration of the SLA was reaping deadly rewards. In mid-October, Hezbollah fighters slipped into the zone and reached within a hundred yards of the border. There they detonated a roadside bomb against a convoy of three armor-plated Mercedes carrying senior IDF officers who were on their way to a meeting with SLA commanders at the militia's 70th battalion headquarters outside Markaba village. The ambush was followed by another attack in the same area against more Israeli officers in civilian cars, this time using a combination of roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades, and machine guns. Two Israelis were killed and six wounded in the attacks.

It was a well-planned ambush, but more worrying for the Israelis was that Hezbollah had clearly gained prior intelligence about the meeting between the Israeli and SLA officers. The Israelis were traveling in civilian cars, but the Hezbollah team was still able to identify them and knew what time they were crossing the border.

Lieutenant General Amnon Shahak, the IDF chief of staff, admitted a month later that the Israeli army had a “serious intelligence problem” in infiltrating Hezbollah. Senior IDF commanders became hunted figures as Hezbollah used intelligence gathered in the zone to trace their movements and plot attacks against them. “I became a very desirable target of the organization,” recalls Colonel Noam Ben-Zvi, a brigade commander between 1996 and 2000 and the last commander of the western sector of the zone. “They followed me on my tours to SLA posts, also on trips to visit civilians. They tried to hit me with mortar fire to the posts I visited, roadside bombs that were waiting for me personally.”

On one occasion, Israeli military intelligence learned of a specific assassination plot against Ben-Zvi being prepared by a Hezbollah operative who owned a metal workshop in Bint Jbeil. When Israeli troops raided the workshop, they found a photograph of Ben-Zvi that Hezbollah had grabbed from Israeli television footage. “Also, we found written instructions on how to do the preparations and the exact way to recognize me and my car,” Ben-Zvi says.

Israel's hold on the occupation zone was unraveling. In the three-month period from August through October 1997, twenty-seven Israeli soldiers had been killed, more than the total for 1996. Hezbollah had learned how to destroy Israeli tanks and stage elaborate ambushes just yards from the border fence. Its intelligence-gathering capabilities had steadily improved. The morale of the SLA was sinking, and the militia was riddled with agents reporting to Hezbollah or Lebanese military intelligence.

The total of thirty-seven Israeli troop fatalities in south Lebanon in 1997 was the highest since 1985, but in strictly military terms it was easily sustainable, indeed negligible. But Hezbollah was acutely aware of Israel's sensitivity to casualties. “The more Israelis we kill the more disputes we'll be sowing among them,” Sheikh Nabil Qawq crowed at the end of October.

Certainly, Hezbollah's successes were having an impact in Israel. The Israeli public was fast tiring of Lebanon. How much longer would they have to endure the deaths of their brothers, husbands, and sons in the dust and mud of south Lebanon? The Four Mothers group in Israel staged regular demonstrations outside the Israeli Ministry of Defense and distributed leaflets at road junctions to further their goal of ending Israel's involvement in Lebanon.

A poll in September, after the Ansariyah raid, found that 52 percent of Israelis now favored a troop pullout from south Lebanon, so long as it was accompanied by security guarantees. Even Ariel Sharon, the architect of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and an advocate of expanding the zone to twenty-five miles from the border, now conceded that a unilateral withdrawal was an option for consideration.

But a military review in November found that the IDF had no choice
but to remain in south Lebanon, pending a peace deal with Syria. Instead, troop numbers would be increased in the occupation zone, more aggressive tactics would be introduced, and armored vehicles and Israeli outposts would receive greater protection.