by Jack Leman
They heard a truck honking outside, and Ghassan jumped up.
“Fuad, help me slide the doors.”
A blue van moved in and stopped by the truck where the soldiers were waiting hungrily.
While Ghassan and Fuad closed the noisy gates, six soldiers jumped from the van. They were wearing other uniforms than the Air Defense wore, and they had non-regular beards.
“Here is the bread,” said one of them, lifting his hand towards the hungry soldiers. Before the soldiers could react, six gunshots erupted and the six crew soldiers fell dead on the floor.
The shots echoed in the hangar, and Ghassan and the engineer stopped in their tracks. They bolted towards the source of the noise.
“What the hell was that?”
Ghassan pulled his gun, armed it, and pointed it at Fuad,
“Don’t move, Fuad… don’t make me shoot you. Please…”
He was sweating profusely, and he felt his hand holding the gun tremble uncontrollably.
Fuad was not expecting such a move and turned slowly to his commanding officer with his mouth open in disbelief.
“Please don’t move,” begged Ghassan; “They will spare your life if you do as you are told.”
Fuad was too shocked to say anything.
The bearded fighters pulled the corpses to a corner, loaded all the equipment on the ground into the vans, and beckoned Ghassan and Fuad to get into the blue van. They faced two guards with their guns in their hands. Before they sat, a guard took Ghassan’s gun, emptied the bullets and gave him back his empty gun. Fuad, who thought Ghassan was part of the snatch, was bewildered at this obvious lack of confidence. He looked up at Ghassan with inquiring eyes, but said nothing.
From the open sliding door of the van, they watched the commander of the soldiers pacing the floor with his cell phone in his hand. Ghassan saw him dial a number. He just listened carefully, then typed a message and sent it.
Once he received confirmation that his message had reached Gaza, the commander of the hijackers put his phone in his breast pocket and looked at his watch. It was 2.20 am. He turned to his men and ordered:
“We are leaving in 10 minutes. Start the engines!”
7- Wednesday 2:20 am
PIJ Command Office
Gaza
The Operations Commander of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Lebanon and Syria, Abu Dawan, waited impatiently for a WhatsApp message from Syria. There was no Internet or telephone connection between Syria and Gaza. The message from Syria was sent to an unlisted phone number in Beirut, who transmitted it to a cell phone in Cyprus, and from Cyprus he received the text on his cell phone in Gaza. Compared to a normal message, the delay was about a minute. The PIJ in Gaza had assigned him to mastermind this operation, which he had named Operation Noble Crescent. He had used all the contacts he had built up during his forced stay in Lebanon to plan this operation, and he hoped he will be remembered by its success.
After reading the message he turned off his phone, pulled out its battery and its SIM card, put the phone on the floor and crushed it with a loose brick, then destroyed the sim card. He didn’t want to leave any electronic signature that could be picked up by the Israeli big-ears. He was a cautious man: he knew the technical skills of the Israeli team called 8200 to track and pinpoint a cell phone they suspected of terrorist activities. The communication and the dismantling of his phone had lasted less than 30 seconds. It had been too short for an exact localization, even if they had tried.
He knew well the Israeli prison system for having spent six years in it. In 2007, Israeli undercover agents had snatched him in the bustling Gaza City center, thrown him in a smelly van, and shipped him to Israel. After having waited one year in an administrative detention center, he began serving his 12 years’ sentence in the huge Ktzi’ot Prison, just south of Beersheba. In 2011, the Israelis had sent him back to Gaza as part of a prisoner exchange with Hamas. After his return home in Gaza, Abu Dawan, like most of the prisoners liberated in the exchange, continued his military activities, which he liked to call armed defense activities. In 2013, undercover Israeli agents arrested him again. The same year, Egypt brokered an agreement between Israel and Hamas, and with 32 of his friends they expelled him to Lebanon. Ever since he kept a grudge against Hamas, he held them responsible for his exile to Lebanon.
During his banishment in Beirut, with the anointment of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, he had set up the Lebanese branch of the PIJ. Fate made him encounter, and establish good relations with the chief of Hezbollah and with the head of the Iranian al-Quds Force, Major General Kassem Soleimani. Although it had not been easy to bridge the sectarian divide between the Sunni PIJ and the Shia Hezbollah, Dawan’s reputation and diplomatic skills earned respect on both sides, and helped resolve the most pressing issues. Comforted by his powerful friends in Lebanon, he had opened the PIJ branch in Syria.
After the assassination of General Soleimani in Bagdad Airport by an American drone strike, Abu Dawan suspected that the Hezbollah organization and the Al Quds were infiltrated by traitors working for the US, and he felt they had breached his security. He finished his last preparations and discreetly left Lebanon for a lengthy trip that would take him to Gaza.
He left Beirut under a false identity and landed in Cyprus. There, he switched again his identity and flew to Cairo. From there he reached the town of Ismailia by bus, then ended up as a passenger in a vegetable truck to arrive in the suburbs of Rafah.
Rafah was a little town on the border of Egypt and Gaza. A tall wall had divided the town since the 2005 unilateral disengagement of Israel and the Egyptian-Israeli agreement to control the borders with Gaza. In reality, the Egyptians needed little pressure to build a wall; they were happy about the opportunity given to them. There was only one crossing point, and Egyptian President Mubarak did his best to keep it locked. When he was deposed by the people, Egypt held elections and Morsi, the leader of the Moslem Brotherhood Party, was elected as President. Hamas, who had been a fervent supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, celebrated his election. Morsi kept a closed eye on the Rafah border and Hamas felt free to import to Gaza all the weapons they could lay their hands on. The attacks on Israel increased and Egypt never condemned them.
After the military coup d’état that brought General Sissi to power, the relations with Hamas soured to the point of enmity since Hamas supported the Muslim Brotherhood and the deposed Egyptian President Morsi.
Before his capture by the Israelis, Abu Dawan was the PIJ’s supply officer in Gaza, controlling all the goods and weapons entering the strip. As someone with such authority, it had been easy to convince some influential family chieftains to finance the construction of new tunnels under the border. In view of their success, the numbers of tunnels swelled. Some of them were very sophisticated, reinforced by cement, and with ventilation systems. Soon the PIJ became business associates with these extensive families and competed, with success, against the network of tunnels belonging to Hamas.
With the soldiers under his command, he assumed the security of the tunnels. He hired a group of local smugglers who used the tunnels to bring into Gaza not only vital goods but also the essential fertilizer for agricultural use. But the farmers never received the fertilizer. Instead, all the fertilizer ended in the hands of the PIJ who used it as the raw material to produce explosives. Besides dispatching commercial goods across the border, the tunnels were also used to smuggle people who wanted to meet their family on the other side of the wall. The PIJ was getting enough funds through this business now to bribe Hamas to turn a blind eye on their tunnel activity.
He had used one of the reinforced tunnels to cross into Gaza. Since his departure from Beirut, he had taken considerable risks, but he wanted to be in the center of the storm when all hell would break loose. He longed to lead his men and teach the Zionists a lesson.
Ever since he had arrived in Gaza, he had been adamant about his security. Every day he had changed houses to avoid being caught by the I
sraeli undercover agents that mixed with the Arab population of the city. The Israeli internal security agency, Shin Bet, was also responsible for the security and intelligence of the West Bank and Gaza. In the occupied territories they operated with autonomous units of Israelis of Arab origin named Duvdevan. They were disguised as local Arabs and mixed so well that the Palestinian population and the secret services found it impossible to spot them; but once they were spotted, there was no mercy. He hoped the TV reports showing two agents being caught and dismembered by a frenzied crowd in Ramallah in 2000, was imprinted in the brains of each of the Duvdevan members and instilled fear in their guts.
Yesterday, as the Commander of the Military Forces of the PIJ, he had met the officers of the armed forces of the PIJ and got a first-hand report of their fighting capacity. They had an army of 900 fighters armed with assault rifles and RPGs. The PIJ had converted some car repair workshops to produce the rockets that pounded the Zionist entity regularly. Since then, the workshops had become prized targets for the Israeli planes and helicopters. The rockets troops were in a division separated from the combatant troops. The production of the rockets, their maintenance and launching was done by militiamen who were not armed while detachments of armed militiamen assured their security.
Today he was hiding on the roof of a six-floor building in a busy area of Rimal, near the port of Gaza. Despite the number of people living in it, no one had paid attention to the men entering their premises. His men were in the street and had established a discreet security perimeter around the building He felt secure hiding among the rows of hanging laundry. The flapping laundry would prevent the Israeli eyes in the sky from spotting them. He also needed the height of the roof to make sure he got a better signal on his cell phone; he couldn’t afford to miss the message because of a weak signal.
Abu Dawan turned towards the young fighter who was looking at him with respect and pointed at his handheld radio and nodded to him.
The young fighter got busy immediately and sent the arranged code. After a few minutes 28 Grad rockets, all made in Gaza based on Russian design, would be launched from seven camouflaged stations within the city and would fly towards their targets in southern Israel. The Zionists would be busy for some time.
It was time to move to another hiding place before Israeli bombs fell on Gaza.
8- Wednesday 2:35 am
Moshav Shuva
Southern Israel
Religious Jews, mostly of North African origin, had established the moshav or communal farm in the 1950s. The warm summer heat was a challenge for the men, so they adapted their working hours to the heat of the day. They started their work before sunrise, stopped at 10 am for a light lunch and rest until 5 pm. They had dinner and went to work until sunset. It was not a simple way of life: you needed to be idealistic to pursue such an existence. They had settled in this part of the Negev desert because of its beauty and the incentives the government gave- but they had not taken into consideration that they would have problems with their neighbors in Gaza, a mere six kilometers from the moshav.
Now the 700 souls living in the moshav were asleep. They had been outdoors since sunrise to tend the orchards and the animals on the farm. After milking the goats, they transferred the milk to the large tanks at the cheese factory to produce the goat cheese, much in demand in Israel. They had to wait hours for the electricity to be restored because some repair work was being done on a transformer damaged by the latest crazy invention of their neighbors. Hamas militants in Gaza tied incendiary bombs to helium balloons and let them fly over the fenced border, hoping they would land in the moshav’s cultivated lands and set the crops on fire. IDF soldiers around the moshav tried to shoot down these balloons, but it was difficult to hit such a small, moving target with conventional weapons.
The army worked hard to provide safety for the people living there and was now testing a new optical scope system called SMASH 2000. The system worked with a red dot laser mounted on a gun tracking the moving balloons or drones, and once the dot was on the target, the computer incorporated in the scope calculated a firing solution. The soldier had to hold the trigger down and the shot would go only when a hit was ensured. But that was only during the day.
At night, the threats were more deadly.
Ariel listened to his wife’s soft and regular breathing. She was lucky; she was the kind to put her head on the pillow and fall asleep right away. On the other hand, he had sleeping problems since he was discharged from the army; the moments of horror he lived when he was fighting in Lebanon still haunted him. At the time he was facing Hezbollah, he did his duty and protected his country, but it came with a price that left a permanent scar. After his military service he had convinced his wife to live in the Negev, far from the northern border with Lebanon and far away from Hezbollah, hoping that they would enjoy their life here. He worked in the cheese factory and she worked in the flower packaging unit of the moshav. Their children grew up in a large family-like commune where everybody knew everyone and all the children enjoyed, despite their small age, relative freedom of movement in the moshav. But close to their living area, Gaza was boiling. Millions were stuck in a small strip of land, unemployment was rife, and violence and death were a daily occurrence.
He felt sorry for the people of Gaza; rejected by the Egyptians, manipulated by Arab countries, and blockaded by the Israelis, they had no future. In the past, the Gazan farmers helped the people of the moshav with the harvests; many were regular employees of the moshav. Now that Gaza was sealed, the friendships were over; hatred and violence were the rule.
He listened to the silence of the night. He could feel the tension in the air. Lately, the newspapers had talked about rumors of tunnels dug under the border, which would lead armed militants close to the Moshav. From there they could carry out attacks on the settlements from within Israel. All these rumors fueled his anxiety. He was afraid to fall asleep because he knew the nightmare of finding himself face to face with terrorists in his living room would come to haunt him.
He was wide awake as soon as he heard the alarm sirens of incoming fire from Gaza. He got up and ran to the bedroom of his sleeping son while his wife Hannah jumped from her bed and ran to their daughter’s room. They knew the drill. They grabbed the children and ran; within a few seconds they had reached the shelter in the basement. The shelter could withstand direct rocket hits on their house. With the subsidies of the government, they had built and equipped it with food and goods to sustain a lockdown of the entire family for four days. On one wall there were shelves with water bottles and canned food. To the left of the thick bombproof door, a little cubicle housed the chemical toilet. Two bunk beds formed an L on the facing wall. The light beige color of the walls gave the shelter a cozy atmosphere. There were many books and games to keep the family busy.
While the children continued to sleep in the bunk beds, they heard the whoosh of the launching and the explosions of the Iron Dome interceptors; they destroyed the incoming rockets in the air before they could hit the ground. So far, the Iron Dome had performed perfectly; the few rockets that went through the barrage landed in the fields without damage to buildings, or caused loss of life. When the Iron Dome radars detected the launching of rockets from Gaza, it calculated an approximate impact point for the incoming rocket and launched an interceptor only if the target was endangering structures or lives. If the destination was an empty field, the system saved its ammunition for another rocket.
Ariel thought as much as he liked the desert and the communal life of the moshav, it was time for him and his family to get a new job and move to the safety of central Israel, out of the firing range of the terrorists in Gaza. He realized with sadness that they had spent the last 10 nights in the shelter. It was impossible to raise children under these conditions.
9-Wednesday 2:40 am
Nevatim Air Base
North Negev, Israel
Two F-35s of the Golden Eagle 140th Squadron from the Nevatim Air Base in the nor
thern Negev desert scrambled while a third stood ready for take-off and to fly as backup, if needed. They would be over their targets in Gaza in seven minutes.
The pilot of the leading F-35, Captain Gideon Yoti made the last checks of his weapons system, verified that the target coordinates transmitted by the Command Center had been saved in the guidance system of the six Spice guided precision bombs and two Paveway II missiles he carried in the plane’s belly.
The Spice was a GPS-guided precision bomb developed in Israel. It was equipped with an on-board navigation system to calculate its actual position, adjust to the correct trajectory, and home precisely on the GPS coordinates saved in the guidance system.
It was overkill to fly F-35s to bomb just a few buildings in an area without air defense like Gaza, but every sortie was a new exercise and a lesson to learn for the Israeli Air Force (IAF).
For the sake of the exercise, he did not turn on his IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) system. The IFF would send a code to the active search radars, showing to the Israelis that he was a friendly aircraft and showing as a hostile aircraft on enemy radars. Even if Hamas or the Israelis launched accidentally a missile against his plane, the system would prevent the missile from homing in on him. The F-35 was a stealth fighter plane, and it would be barely visible on the radars only when it was in the final approach to its target, with its bomb bays open. Suddenly a fuzzy blip would appear out of nowhere on the radars, so that the enemy radars could not identify the blip as an F-35 with certitude, and the air defense systems could not lock on the plane to launch a missile against it. Gideon had to drop his bombs rapidly, close the bomb bay, and disappear again from the radar screens.
