The
new face of terror: a family man who works for the enemy (1)
In
a heavily guarded room at a hospital near Tel Aviv, Israeli interrogators have
been trying to solve a question that has baffled the entire world. What – or
who – turned Khalil Abu Olbeh, a mild-mannered Palestinian bus driver with no
record of violence or political militancy, into a ruthless killer?
Sickened and angry, Israel buried most of the eight
young victims yesterday – seven of them soldiers, seven of them aged 21 or
younger, five of them women – whom he mowed down with his bus as they stood at
a hitch-hiking post at Azur, a few miles south of Tel Aviv, at rush hour on
Wednesday morning.
But the country's grief was coupled with
bewilderment. Suddenly, Israel finds itself gazing at a new face of an old enemy
– an attacker who worked compliantly within its midst for years, who
repeatedly passed security checks, yet who, suddenly, set out to kill as many
Israelis as he could.
Only a week earlier, Ariel Sharon was elected Prime
Minister by a vast margin because Israel believed his promise that he could keep
them secure. But the carnage reaped by Mr Abu Olbeh – and the fact that he
could do so without bombs or bullets – had already proved the emptiness of
that pledge, shaking Israel to its core.
According to the respected Ha'aretz newspaper, the
interrogators quizzing Mr Abu Olbeh as he lay in Kaplan hospital at Rehovot,
with his bullet wounds swathed in bandages, have been told by him that the
attack was pre-planned. But this does not explain why he did it.
There are plenty of men like Khalil Abu Olbeh living
in the Gaza Strip. They are quiet men who do not belong to the militant
political organisations and guerrilla groups leading the Palestinian intifada.
They are working men, who devote their energies to
feeding their families, a task that is far from easy in an imprisoned society in
which nearly a third of the population has but $2 a day to spend. They are men,
past their youthful years, who sit all day behind the wheels of cabs or on
market stalls, before gathering in groups in the rubbish-strewn streets as the
sun sets over the sand-dune-covered prison in which they live, encircled by the
Israeli military. You meet his type often. Only when the subject of Israel comes
up do you glimpse the anger that boils inside them.
And when you do, it becomes clear that it is a
deeply ingrained emotion, a rage steadily grafted onto their being by a lifetime
under Israeli military occupation – for that is what it still must be called,
even though two-thirds of the strip is now under Yasser Arafat's rule – for
year after year. At 35, Mr Abu Olbeh knew nothing else. He was a babe in arms
when the Israeli occupation began in 1967.
But he was better than most at concealing his fury.
So good was he that he joined the list of only 16,000 Gazans to whom Israel's
Shin Bet security services was willing to grant permission to leave the strip
during the emergency caused by the intifada.
On 25 January, after the last of many security
checks, he reportedly received a fresh permit to work inside Israel. And why
not? To the Israeli security officials scrutinising his records, he set off no
alarm bells. He had never been arrested, either by them or the Palestinian
security forces. His details breathed compliance ... married, with five
children, three boys and two girls aged between three and 11; living modestly
with his wife, Menal, 32, who is four-months pregnant; his mother and his
brother's family in a cinderblock house.
The hatred felt towards Israel is everywhere in
Gaza. It blazes from the walls – with their posters of the latest
"martyrs" shot by the Israeli military, and paintings of the al-Aqsa
mosque in Jerusalem, the holy place for which the Palestinians have convinced
themselves that they are fighting. It blares from the Palestinian-run radio and
television stations.
Yet it seems no one suspected how deeply it was
gnawing into him. When western reporters first reached his relatives on
Wednesday – just as Israel was slamming the door even more tightly shut, by
imposing a total closure on the occupied territories in response to the attack
– the family seemed truly bewildered. Several were sure it was a road accident
– a theory later floated, to the disgust of Israelis, by Yasser Arafat
himself. His wife, Menal, still believes this.
There will have been amazement, and also horror,
among the agents of Shin Bet. Khalil Abu Olbeh bore no similarity to Israel's
photo fit of the archetypal Palestinian militant – who is young, male, single,
and has links to radical Islamic groups. In fact, in Israeli terms, he was so
spotless that his own neighbours in Sheikh Radwan, a refugee housing project in
Gaza City, began to suspect that he was a collaborator.
His credentials also fitted the requirements of the
Israeli bus company, Egged, for whom he has worked since 1996. Most of their
Palestinian drivers are over 40 – an age where the impulse to rise up and
fight are deemed to have wilted.
Yet there were hints that something was smouldering
away within him. Just like most of the other 1.2 million Palestinians in Gaza,
he had suffered from the collective punishment imposed by Israel to try to
stifle the intifada. The blockade of the Gaza Strip meant that he had been
unable to work in Israel for four months.
His is a story that typifies the plight on many
Palestinians living under Israeli closure. He had lost his monthly pay packet of
3,000 shekels (£500) for ferrying workers into Israel. Instead he had been
compelled to fall back on dismally paid occasional work as a taxi driver in the
strip. Even now, with his Israeli permit, he was only getting two days' work a
week . As a result, there were – his wife said yesterday – serious money
worries. An unpaid bill to the grocers of 5,000 shekels (£850); a £300
electricity bill; a humiliating £100 loan from his brother.
He took no active part in the intifada. But like
everyone else, he has also witnessed the Israeli army bulldoze more than 1,000
acres of olive, citrus and palm groves, but he also had a desire to avenge a
string of Palestinian attacks on Israeli soldiers and the 6,000 Jewish settlers
who illegally occupy Gaza.
He had seen Palestinian buildings rocketed and
shelled by Israeli helicopters and gun boats, and Palestinian officials
assassinated. And he had seen thousands of young Palestinians – some
pre-pubescent children – shot dead or maimed by Israeli troops. In the last
few days, heavy battles in southern Gaza appear to have upset him.
As Mr Abu Obleh went to bed on Tuesday, he turned to
his neighbour and said: "God – Allah – will save us." A few hours
later, at 2am, he rose, calmly breakfasted, and set off on a horrifying
pre-planned mission to kill, using his 11-ton Egged bus as his weapon.
Yesterday, Israel was burying the dead. In Ashkelon,
hundreds of mourners stood in the drizzle as the first of four flag-draped
coffins – carrying 18-year-old Corporal Yasmin Karasi – was lowered into the
ground. "The whole of Ashkelon is crying," the city's mayor, Benny
Vaknin, said, before condemning "terrorists who without conscience ... want
to kill innocent Jews".
The grieving will pass, but the other questions will
not. How is Israel to stop this happening again? How are Israelis to deal with a
guerrilla enemy that lives in its midst, and will resort to killing with their
hands? Yet until an answer is found, there will be more Khalil Abu Olbeh's.
Independent,
16-2-2001.