Warriors of God (32 page)

Yet the new tactics were little more than a holding action, an attempt to stave off the collapse of the zone while the politicians sought to find a means of exiting Lebanon with some reassurances for the postwithdrawal security of northern Israel.

The Israeli government could not commit to an unconditional withdrawal, despite the rising Israeli public discontent over the Lebanon imbroglio. A unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon would convey the impression of defeat, the idea that the IDF had been chased out by a band of Shia zealots, which would have unwelcome ramifications for Israel's policy of deterrence against the Palestinians and other Arab foes.

Brigadier General Erez Gerstein, who as head of the IDF's Lebanon Liaison Unit was the top Israeli commander in south Lebanon, was a strong supporter of a continued military presence in Lebanon and an outspoken critic of the peaceniks in Israel. “They are certainly a threat to [Israeli] soldiers,” he fumed in the summer of 1998. “Firstly, by encouraging the local population to cooperate with Hezbollah, because we are on our way out of their territory, and secondly, by boosting the morale of the terrorists who feel this is a sign of the IDF's weakness.”

The IDF's general staff, unwilling to abandon the occupation zone, encouraged the government to stand fast. But their reasons went beyond concern over a loss of prestige and a weakening of Israel's deterrence power. After all, for a relatively small price—in military terms at least—of an average of twenty soldiers killed each year, the army controlled what was in effect a free military training ground, a “deluxe laboratory without settlers,” the Israeli
Haaretz
newspaper once wrote. What better place for the IDF to develop doctrine, test new weapons, provide combat experience to troops and aircrews, and subcontract a proxy militia
to do the bulk of the frontline fighting while demanding and receiving a substantial slice of the annual government budget?

Furthermore, the conflict was conducted out of sight of the Israeli media—journalists were banned from the zone except under rare and controlled circumstances, allowing the military to manipulate the flow of information to the public. And new battlefield skills and tactics could be honed. Egoz, the Israeli army's elite antiguerrilla warfare unit, owed its existence to the conflict in south Lebanon. Hezbollah's ability to destroy Merkava tanks in 1997 with AT-4 and TOW antitank missiles helped shape the design of the Merkava Mark 4, the latest version, which entered service in 2002. As a consequence of that experience in south Lebanon in the 1990s, the Merkava Mark 4, one of the most heavily armored tanks in the world, coped remarkably well against Hezbollah's third-generation antitank missiles in its first proper combat action during the July 2006 war.

Artillery crews used south Lebanon as a firing range beyond the requirements of combating Hezbollah attacks. Outdated stocks of ammunition were routinely fired into south Lebanon, according to senior UNIFIL officers, a more cost effective means of disposing of old ammunition than transporting it to the Negev desert in southern Israel for destruction.

One spring morning in 1999, while I was driving through a small frontline village called Jabal Botm, the sudden roar of an Israeli F-16 swooping over the village and a tall column of smoke and dust blooming above a hill warned that yet another air raid was in progress. In the center of the village, a cluster of small stone and cement houses on a steep hill, a Hezbollah man in combat trousers and a black baseball cap held a walkie-talkie to his face and watched the raid. An old woman sat on a rug nearby, enjoying the morning sunshine as she sorted through a pile of freshly picked thyme and peppery arugula leaves. Hezbollah had
shelled a nearby Israeli outpost about half an hour earlier, and the air raid was Israel's response.

The two jets, like flecks of silver, floated lazily across the sky in sweeping circles, taking turns to drop, nose first, into a graceful dive, release a bomb, and then rise again, leaving a trail of antimissile flares in their wake. The unperturbed Hezbollah man counted into his walkie-talkie each bomb dropped into the nearby wadi, while the old woman smiled contentedly as she picked through her herbs, completely ignoring the air raid. The measured pace of the bombing runs and the calm indifference of the woman and the Hezbollah man made the air raid seem soporific and banal.

Air combat patrols increased beginning in 1998, when Israeli troops spent more time hunkered down in newly hardened hilltop outposts. That year, Israel staged almost 150 air raids (compared to just 21 in 1990), but the vast bulk of them consisted of dropping aerial bombs into wadis vacated earlier by Hezbollah's “shoot and scoot” teams. “Crushing rocks” was the cynical term used by UNIFIL officers for these air strikes. But the combat air patrols speeded up the response time to Hezbollah attacks in the zone and also granted the crews useful experience, operating in a war scenario and flying over hostile territory.

Other than the routine combat patrols, the Israelis employed helicopter gunships for pinpoint strikes and assassinations and UAVs for reconnaissance and remote control IED detonation. The war in south Lebanon helped Israel become one of the world's leading pioneers in UAV technology, second only to the United States.

In October 1999, a pair of Cobra helicopters staged a missile strike against a house on the edge of Qabrikha, which overlooked the rolling grassland of the zone's central sector. I was in the village at the time, chatting with residents, when our conversation was interrupted by the sound of approaching helicopters. A loud explosion shook the village, then we saw two Cobras, painted in drab olive brown, emerge from a backdrop of dun-colored hills. Shedding antimissile flares in their wake, the helicopters wheeled and turned a few hundred yards east of the village before heading toward the low hills on the horizon that marked the
border. Two cars, horns blaring, raced down the lane. In the backseat of the rear car, a man had his face buried in his hands. The explosion was caused by a missile fired from one of the helicopters that struck a half-built home of cinder block walls. A crowd had gathered in the center of the village: women with anxious faces, old men kneading worry beads. Grim-faced Hezbollah members cordoned off the targeted house while their comrades sifted through the rubble. Fragments of the missile lay scattered in the garden, some of the components still too hot to touch. A UAV, which had been circling the village all morning, continued to whine overhead, filming the aftermath of the helicopter strike.

In mid-August 1999, a UAV was employed to kill a senior Hezbollah military commander, one of Israel's most successful assassinations in Lebanon. Ali Deeb, also known as Khodr “Abu Hassan” Salameh, the same operative who had kidnapped four Russian diplomats in 1985, was the head of Hezbollah's special operations unit for south Lebanon in the late 1990s. Deeb was killed while driving his old BMW in a Sidon suburb when two bombs exploded beside his vehicle, detonated by a UAV overhead. Although the Israelis denied involvement in the assassination at the time, it was a significant intelligence coup to locate and kill a Hezbollah commander of such stature and experience.

The Israelis almost repeated that success six months later in a helicopter assassination attempt against Ibrahim Aql, a close aide to Imad Mughniyah and a top military commander. Four Apache helicopters sped across the zone and tailed a red Mercedes carrying Aql and one other person. One of the Apaches fired a missile at his car. It missed and struck an adjacent building. Alerted by the explosion, Aql leaped out of the car just before a second missile struck the vehicle. A third missile hit the road beside him but failed to explode. Aql jumped to his feet and ran into a building as the helicopters abandoned the attack and returned to Israel.

Aql was a top resistance leader, so his narrow escape received little comment from Hezbollah. But a similar incident a few days earlier was given the full propaganda treatment. A four-man Hezbollah squad had penetrated the zone's central sector and clashed with an SLA patrol near the village of Markaba. One of the Hezbollah men told his comrades he
would provide covering fire for them to slip out of the zone. Now on his own, the fighter was spotted by an Israeli UAV, which tracked him as he ran past a house, across a field, and down a street in Markaba. He entered an empty house and moments later jumped out the back just before a helicopter fired a missile into the building. The UAV continued to track the lone fighter as he ran through more fields. An F-16, one of several jets circling overhead, fired a missile at the fighter, and there was a large explosion. It appeared to be a job well done, and in a rare move, the Israeli Air Force handed a copy of the UAV video footage to Israeli television stations. The previous day, three officers from the Paratroop Reconnaissance Battalion had been killed in a Hezbollah ambush. The release of the dramatic UAV tape appeared to be an attempt to show the Israeli public that despite setbacks, the IDF was also achieving successes in Lebanon.

But two days later, the star of the UAV tape showed up alive and only moderately wounded in a hospital in Sidon. He said that the missile fired by the F-16 had landed just feet away, and that he was struck by shrapnel and lost his hearing briefly. Once he recovered his senses, he continued running until he reached safe territory and reported back to his unit.

“What will they field next against the holy fighters?” crowed a commentary on Hezbollah radio. “They have tried electronic sensors, drones, infrared cameras, jets, helicopters.… What a slap on the face of the Zionists who aired this footage to give the impression of great success to their impotent army.”

Crucially for a casualty-conscious Israel, despite the variety of aerial tactics used in Lebanon—air combat patrols, UAV surveillance, helicopter gunship assassinations—the risk of losing Israeli air crews to Hezbollah ground fire was almost nonexistent. Hezbollah's rudimentary air defense systems—23 mm and 57 mm cannons and shoulder-fired SAM-7 missiles—represented little threat to Israeli jets. Low-flying helicopters were more vulnerable to these weapons, especially when Hezbollah's antiaircraft guns began playing a more prominent role in 1998 in response to Israel's increased use of airpower in Lebanon. But the Israeli helicopter crews soon developed countermeasures against the menace of Hezbollah
ground fire. UNIFIL peacekeepers reported witnessing on several occasions Israeli helicopter gunships deliberately hovering just out of range to draw Hezbollah fire while other helicopters attacked the antiaircraft positions at low level. No Israeli jets were downed over Lebanon in the 1990s, and only one helicopter, a Cobra, fell victim to ground fire when its tail rotor was struck and damaged by a 23 mm gun in June 1999 and it crash-landed inside the zone.

Given the relative safety of air combat missions and the enormous experience gained, it is small wonder that Israeli air commanders were loath to abandon the occupation zone. After the loss of the vast expanse of the Sinai peninsula following the peace treaty with Egypt in 1979, Lebanon became the main training ground for the air force and a “paradise” for its combat pilots, wrote Gal Luft, a former IDF battalion commander in south Lebanon.
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“More: for over fifteen years, Israeli pilots gained the experience of launching pinpoint air strikes against real targets with live munitions. As a result, Israeli pilots have been among the most well-trained pilots in the world.”

Besides providing military training and combat experience, south Lebanon represented a free testing range for Israel's flourishing arms industry to try out new weapons and equipment. It came with the added bonus that new military gear could be marked as “combat proven,” a valuable marketing asset and one that many competitors could not share.

“South Lebanon was a free laboratory,” says Timur Goksel. “It was an arms manufacturing man's dream to have a laboratory like this one. The Israeli military industry always had an advantage over rivals because they could always claim that their weapons had been combat proven, from tanks to radio sets.”

One of Israel's combat-proven weapons, thought to have been developed and tested in secret in south Lebanon, was the Spike-ER (Extended Range) antitank missile, designed by Israel's state-owned Rafael armaments company.

In early 1998, rumors began to surface in south Lebanon of the existence of a new “mini–cruise missile” that could dodge trees and skirt hills before hitting its target. The first recorded sighting of this mysterious missile was in late February, when Finnish UNIFIL peacekeepers saw a projectile fired from a hilltop Israeli position. The missile exploded beside a civilian car on the edge of a frontline village about five miles away.

In the middle of May, two identical missiles were fired from the same Israeli position at a squad of Amal fighters attempting to infiltrate the occupation zone. Finnish UNIFIL soldiers reported that the missiles sounded like a “jet plane” as they flew through the air. The first missile veered off course and exploded harmlessly. The second exploded beside the startled Amal fighters. “It came as a complete surprise to us,” one of the Amal guerrillas later grumbled to me. “We were more angry at having been spotted than at being wounded.”

Twelve days later, Hussein Moqalled, twenty, and his seventeen-year-old brother Mohammed were walking through a valley on the edge of the zone beside Arab Salim village when a missile flew up the length of the valley, swung toward them at the last moment, and exploded. Mohammed took the brunt of the blast and died instantly. His brother was badly burned on the back but survived.

In early July, a Norwegian UNIFIL soldier manning a checkpoint in the eastern sector of the zone saw a missile fired from an Israeli position. The missile left a long trail of white smoke, “had an unstable course and moved with a loud whizzing sound,” according to an internal UNIFIL report. The missile crashed into a hillside. The Israeli army admitted to UNIFIL that the missile had gone out of control, and they instructed the peacekeepers to stay away from the crash site. Israeli troops later collected the vital components, leaving a few scraps of twisted metal for the curious peacekeepers to examine.