January  Friday 12-2001:

“Israel” uses secret units and informers to battle intifada
But still no coordinated response by Palestinian groups…(1)

This is the conclusion of a two-part series on “Israel’s” harsh reaction
to the Palestinian uprising and the intensified violence that could result

According to Palestinian human-rights activists, dozens of Palestinians have recently complained about efforts by Shin Bet and “Israeli” military intelligence to recruit them as informers.
Bassem Eid, a leading human-rights campaigner who has been as critical of Arafat’s administration as he has of the “Israelis”, said that many of those approached work in “Israel” and had been threatened with losing their permits if they did not cooperate. It must be assumed that there are some who have agreed to work for the “Israelis”.
“The “Israelis” are worried that since withdrawing from some Palestinian areas they have lost the ability to gather security and other sensitive information,” said Eid, director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. “They need people living inside the territories.”
Alan Bani Odeh, for instance, worked in “Israel” as a laborer and claimed he was arrested by “Israeli” intelligence agents in February near Tulkarem who drugged him and threatened to blackmail him.
“When I woke up,” he said, ““Israeli” officers showed me sexually compromising photographs and threatened to show them to my wife and children.”
Two days before his cousin was blown up, he added, the agents took him to “Israel” and kept his car for three hours before telling him to deliver it to his cousin.
Undercover “Israeli” Army units have been in action since the intifada erupted.
These are primarily the Duvdevan (Cherry) group that operates in the West Bank and the Shimshon (Sampson) unit that covers Gaza. Both these outfits were formed during the 1987-93 intifada, during which their teams, often disguised as Arab women, were believed responsible for the murder of more than 160 Palestinians.
Their existence was not officially acknowledged until April 1991. They continued operations after that intifada ended ­ and the peace process began ­ and have been involved in more than a score of assassinations in that period. Authorities revealed in August 1998 that a secret police counter-terrorism unit known as HaGidonim (Gideon) had been operating for nearly a decade in Al-Quds, particularly the occupied Arab sector.
So-called night-time “training exercises” were being carried out months before the latest crisis erupted, including one in August in which a Duvdevan squad shot dead three of its own men in an attempted to capture Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Hanoun, the last of a half-dozen top activists systematically hunted down over the last five years. That and other incidents underlined how the “Israeli” Army was prepared to continue covert operations inside Palestinian territory even if a final settlement was reached with Yasser Arafat.
A week after the Oct. 12 lynching by a Ramallah mob of two young army sergeants who “Israeli” officials said had mistakenly driven into the town, Deputy Defense (War) Minister Ephraim Sneh announced that up to eight men believed to have been involved in the killings were seized in Palestinian-controlled territory around Ramallah.
Palestinian security forces were not involved.
Palestinian officials said later that those who killed and mutilated the two “Israelis” believed the men were members of an undercover unit that had infiltrated self-rule areas and “committed savage acts ­ including the summary execution of some individuals.”
On Nov. 15, Communications Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer said that a combined force of Shin Bet agents, the army’s Duvdevan, and other undercover units, along with the Border Police, had grabbed 15 Tanzim members suspected of shooting “Israeli” soldiers and civilians. The sweep occurred in the Ramallah and Nablus areas, parts of which are Palestinian-controlled territory. On Nov. 22, four Palestinians were killed in an army ambush near a Jewish settlement in the southern Gaza Strip. The “Israelis” said the army had been seeking to capture Abdel Razeq, a Fatah militant who was one of those shot dead.
The Palestinians view these “Israelis” operations as dangerously provocative and warn that they will not go unanswered. Most “Israelis” see these actions as legitimate in fighting terrorists, although some are beginning to question the wisdom, if not the morality, of them.
With little prospect of renewing negotiations and with the violence expected to drag on for months, maybe longer, the “Israelis” are likely to step up their operations. They have also maintained a punitive economic blockade of West Bank towns to prevent the low-intensity conflict from mushrooming into all-out guerrilla warfare.
Gal Luft, an “Israeli” military analyst, said the unilateral withdrawal from south Lebanon in May had increased pressure on Arafat to emulate Hizbullah’s successful guerrilla tactics.
“We now see many of the indicators and elements of a guerrilla war,” he said. “It’s low-intensity warfare against military and civilian targets, coupled with widespread support from the local population.”
Until late November, the Palestinians had not carried out any major attacks inside “Israel” itself, sought to deploy their 30,000-plus armed police force in any appreciable manner, or even launch sustained and coordinated attacks against the 400 or so Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza which are populated by some 200,000 heavily armed “Israelis”.
Whether that was a tactical decision not to escalate the violence too heavily, or whether “Israeli” security prevented the Palestinians from turning up the heat is not clear. But once the Palestinians elect to go for any one of these options, or a combination of all three, the intifada, already becoming a low-intensity guerrilla war, could mushroom into a serious bloodbath that carries the danger of dragging in outside forces.
There was a car bomb in Al-Quds that killed two “Israelis” on Nov. 2, but at the time that was an isolated incident claimed by Islamic Jihad. However, an evening rush-hour car bombing on Nov. 22 in the coastal town of Hadera, between Tel Aviv and Haifa, in which two people were killed and 37 wounded, pointed to an escalation in such attacks inside “Israel” itself.
On Dec. 28, 13 “Israelis” were wounded in a bomb explosion in a Tel Aviv bus that was claimed by the Saladin Brigades, a group unknown before this intifada. The attack was the first in Tel Aviv since March 1997, when a suicide bomber blew up a sidewalk cafe, killing three women and wounding 50 other people.
Ten people were wounded in a bombing in the main street of the coastal town of Netanya, 30 kilometers north of Tel Aviv, on Jan. 1, but the threatened bombing onslaught the “Israelis” feared has so far failed to materialize.
The “Israelis” claimed that a Jordanian-born Palestinian they arrested for the Dec. 28 Tel Aviv bombing had said he was recruited by the Tanzim, Fatah’s military arm, and Palestinian intelligence agents in Nablus, which is controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Moussa Arafat, a cousin of the Palestinian leader who heads military intelligence, denied the allegation, the first time the “Israelis” have specifically accused the Authority of direct involvement in a bombing inside “Israel”. That could well signal a new round of attacks on key Arafat personnel.
Generally, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, two Islamic groups who have terrorized “Israel” with deadly suicide bombings in the past, have been strangely quiescent since the intifada began. It may well be that their capabilities have been eroded by the killing or capture of their best operatives, such as the Awadallah brothers and Moheiddine Sharif over the last two or three years, as well as Arafat’s crackdown on these groups since the mid-1990s as part of his commitment to curb terrorism.
But they should not be discounted too readily. Arafat has released scores of Hamas activists, and they may come into play if the crisis deteriorates ­ as it seems to be doing.
On Nov. 7, the “Israeli” Navy reported a bungled suicide bombing against one of its patrol boats in the Mediterranean off the Gaza Strip. Hamas later said one of its men, Hamdi Nsiew, perished in the action, which may have been inspired by the suicide bombers who rammed a small boat packed with explosives against the US Navy destroyer Cole in Aden on Oct. 12, crippling the $1 billion warship and killing 17 sailors.
On Oct. 26, a 24-year-old Islamic Jihad activist on an explosives-packed bicycle blew himself up at an “Israeli” Army post, wounding a soldier. The only other known suicide bombing since the intifada began came on Dec. 22, when Hisham Najjar, 24, blew himself up in a cafe in the northern West Bank, wounding three “Israeli” soldiers.
Compared to the deadly suicide attacks carried out by Hamas, and to a lesser extent by Islamic Jihad, these bombings have been extremely ineffectual.
Khaled Meshaal, a senior Hamas official who barely survived an “Israeli” assassination attempt in Amman in 1997, has warned that suicide attacks could resume in earnest: “Weak people, if they are boxed into a corner, will use every mean to defend themselves.”
A recent poll by Bir Zeit University showed that 80 percent of Palestinians support suicide attacks against “Israeli” targets and 73 per cent believe US interests should also be hit. Two out of three believed that the Palestinians should emulate Hizbullah. The study said support for suicide attacks has risen steadily since 1995, when only one-third supported such actions.
There has been an increase in Palestinian attacks on settlers, but a sustained and coordinated campaign against the settlements, where the “Israeli” Army is now reinforcing defenses, has yet to happen. That would also trigger a new and highly dangerous phase in the conflict.
Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami has warned of that possibility, noting: “We’ve already crossed into a kind of (Palestinian) behavior similar to that of Hizbullah. I think we really need to prepare for this battle.”
Commentator Amir Oren wrote in Haaretz after the Abayat assassination that it marked a “critical point, almost a point of no return in the scale of the violence.”
“Placing Fatah leaders in the “Israeli” forces’ crosshairs,” Oren warned, “is a clear attempt to have the outcome of the conflict determined in battle, with the understanding that the Palestinians will escalate their methods of attack against soldiers and settlers.”

1-     The Daily Star, 12-1-2001