Helicopter gunships and jets penetrated Lebanese airspace for the first time since May in a bid to intercept the kidnappers. The helicopters clattered above Shebaa and Kfar Shuba villages, blasting the approach roads with their 30 mm guns to prevent any vehicles from leaving. A convoy of civilian cars was shot at on a mountain road between the two villages. The panicked motorists abandoned their cars and fled on foot. At the entrance to Shebaa, at least twenty civilians were wounded when their cars were attacked by helicopters. When ambulances tried to ferry the casualties away, they, too, were hit with missiles.
Two hours after the kidnapping, the helicopters still hung stationary above Shebaa and Kfar Shuba. A crowd of residents in Kfar Shuba watched puffs of dirty gray smoke from Israeli artillery shells explode intermittently against the brush-covered hillsides below one of the IDF’s forward outposts on the edge of the Shebaa Farms. A column of black smoke billowed from another outpost farther down the mountainside. Phosphorus shells had set fire to a large section of the hill and a thick pall of smoke slowly enveloped the Shebaa Farms front. The shelling, the smoke, the helicopters—for a moment, it was if the Israelis had never left. On seeing me, a friend from Marjayoun who had lived his entire life in the south broke away from the small crowd and, bursting into delighted laughter, hurried toward me with a big grin on his face. “Habibi, Nick, I am so happy, so happy,” he said, grabbing my shoulder, as another explosion echoed across the hillside.
“It’s the shelling, the shelling,” he explained on seeing my puzzled expression. “For thirty years I have been listening to the sounds of war: explosions, shooting, bombs. But the silence in the south over the past five months since the Israelis left has been driving me crazy!”
Few others seemed to share my war-happy friend’s elation. The rest of the crowd appeared stunned by the sudden violence that had engulfed their village. “It’s the first time I have seen anything like this,” said a young girl. “Hezbollah are saying they have captured three Israeli soldiers.” She shook her head in wonder. “This is a great achievement.”
Barak warned that Israel would take “decisive action” against Lebanon, and rumors circulated that Israel was threatening to bomb Beirut if the three soldiers were not returned within four hours. Hezbollah was prepared for a stiff Israeli response. The backup teams were in position in the hills facing the Shebaa Farms, and explosive charges had been laid in bomb pits dug beneath roads beside the border. Leaning against the twelfth-century stone wall of Beaufort Castle was a SAM-7 antiaircraft missile launcher. A pair of Hezbollah fighters crouched nearby, heads raised, scanning the blue skies above.
Senior Israeli army officers urged Barak to hit back quickly, concerned that a failure to do so would only embolden Hezbollah to strike again. “We were sure it was only the beginning,” recalls Major General Moshe Kaplinsky, then commander of the Israeli army’s Galilee Division. “We demanded to retaliate strongly straight away. I told [Barak] personally we have to create new rules on the ground.”
But Barak stayed his hand. Despite his threats to respond forcefully to any Hezbollah attack along Israel’s northern border, Barak had no wish to ignite a second front with Hezbollah while he was busy handling the Palestinian intifada. In the sixteen months he had been in office, the Lebanon withdrawal had been his boldest political decision. But the long-term implications of the move were still uncertain—not enough time had elapsed to judge whether the troop pullout would ultimately be beneficial to Israel. Forceful action by Israel in response to the kidnapping was certain to elicit Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel, leaving Barak vulnerable to his critics who had argued against leaving Lebanon in the first place.
Additionally, Barak felt there was little sense in risking a war along the border when much of the blame for the kidnapping had to lie with the Israeli army. Since June, Israeli military officials had warned repeatedly of kidnapping attempts by Hezbollah. Indeed, it appears that the scale of the Hezbollah operation—in which dozens of fighters were involved at one level or another—was picked up by the Israelis and provided the foundation for the public warnings. Kaplinsky admitted to me that the abduction was a “tactical surprise” but not a “strategic surprise.” Given the expectations of an attack in the Shebaa Farms, how was it possible that an unarmored jeep—of a variety normally used along Israel’s quieter borders with Jordan and Egypt—could be permitted to patrol the Blue Line unaccompanied?
Zeev Schiff, the veteran military correspondent for Haaretz, wrote that October 7, 2000, would be remembered as a “black day” for the IDF, which he found “guilty of blatant nonvigilance.”
“A Privilege to Attack Israel”
That evening, UNIFIL discovered two abandoned cars, engines still running, on a road near Kfar Hamam village, three miles east of the Shebaa gate. One of the vehicles, a white Nissan Pathfinder, had been in an accident. The other car was the dark blue Range Rover used in the abduction. Both vehicles had been abandoned in a hurry. Discovered in the back of the Range Rover were bloodstains. At first, the amount of blood found was not made public, but a month later, a senior UNIFIL officer, who had seen both vehicles, told me that “there was very heavy blood loss” in the rear of the Range Rover.
“If it was all from one person, then he would almost certainly have been dead within thirty minutes unless he was treated,” the officer said. In his estimation, even if the blood had been from two people, the wounds would still have been life-threatening.
In fact, the three soldiers were killed in the ambush or died from their wounds shortly afterward. But in the subsequent lengthy negotiations brokered by Ernst Uhrlau, the coordinator of the German secret service, to exchange the three soldiers for Lebanese and Arab detainees in Israel, Nasrallah consistently refused to divulge the condition of his captives. If the Israelis had known the soldiers were dead, they assuredly would have hardened their negotiating position. Other than being a trick of psychological warfare to maximize the pressure on the Israelis, the decision to remain silent on the well-being of the captives also set a precedent for future abductions. If the three soldiers had been kidnapped alive and Nasrallah had provided evidence, he might have obtained a better deal from the Israelis. But it would also have meant that in any future abduction, the Israelis would expect similar proof of life. Without it, they would conclude that the captives were dead and negotiate on that basis. The grim reality, therefore, is that because Nasrallah does not exploit the well-being of the captives to gain additional leverage in the negotiations, it makes no difference whether the hostages are alive. Indeed, a kidnapping is easier if the abductors do not have to worry about snatching the hostage alive—a fact that does not bode well for future victims of Hezbollah abductions.
In the weeks following the kidnapping, rumors emerged in Israel that the three soldiers might have been involved in a drug deal when they were snatched. The Israeli army repeatedly denied the allegations, but the rumors persisted. In April 2001, the German edition of the Financial Times revealed Ramzi Nohra’s involvement in the kidnapping.6 I visited Nohra in his fortified stone mansion in Ibl es-Saqi a few days after the Financial Times report was published and asked him to comment. He regarded me with his lazy smile and said, “It’s laughable.… I deny having anything to do with this. [But] if I was involved, it would have been a privilege to attack Israel.”
Sheikh Nabil Qawq, Hezbollah’s southern commander, was similarly noncommittal, saying the abduction was “a security-military operation and confidential within the framework of Hezbollah operations.”
But the abduction of the three soldiers was not the only kidnapping undertaken by Hezbollah. Eight days after the Shebaa Farms operation, as Nasrallah delivered an address at a conference of Arab and Islamist groups in support of the Palestinian intifada, he stunned his audience by declaring that Hezbollah had captured an Israeli officer in an elaborate sting operation. “With God’s help, I am honored to inform you gladly that the Islamic Resistance performed a qualitative and complex
security operation, capturing an Israeli colonel, who works for an Israeli security apparatus,” he said.
Even before he had finished speaking, the audience erupted into applause and chants of “Allah u-Akbar.” Amid the euphoria, Nasrallah noticed the look of glum resignation on the face of Salim Hoss, the outgoing prime minister, whose final days in office before yielding to Rafik Hariri had been occupied with handling the diplomatic fallout from the kidnapping of the three Israeli soldiers. On seeing Hoss’s gloomy expression, the Hezbollah chief smiled mischievously and joked, “God will help the prime minister for the many phone calls he will get from [U.S. secretary of state Madeleine] Albright.”
The captured Israeli officer was Elhanan Tannenbaum, a fifty-four-year-old businessman and reservist colonel in the Israeli army. Nasrallah claimed that Tannenbaum was working for Mossad and had been attempting to recruit a senior Hezbollah official when he was lured from Switzerland to Beirut, where he was seized. It later emerged that Tannenbaum was kidnapped during the course of arranging a massive shipment of heroin and cocaine from Lebanon into Israel.
As an unexpected bonus for Hezbollah, it was revealed, to the understandable consternation of Israeli military officials, that Tannenbaum had attended a top secret military exercise just five days before his capture.7 The exercise, code-named Northern Forest, was a drill simulation of a war with Syria and involved some of Israel’s best-guarded secrets. Tannenbaum had also helped develop a secret weapons program in which Israel was collaborating with the United States. The program was subsequently scrapped on the assumption that the kidnapped colonel had revealed its details to his Hezbollah interrogators.
EIGHT
The “Fence Around the Homeland”
“It will come, but I don’t know when.”
“Only God knows that.”
—HEZBOLLAH FIGHTERS,
Discussing the potential for war with Israel, March 29, 2002
NOVEMBER 27, 2000
BASTARA, Shebaa Farms—Qassem Zohra and the other ten members of his family were the last remaining inhabitants of the Shebaa Farms. They lived in two single-room stone hovels at Bastara, one of the fourteen original farms, which lay on a bluff overlooking a vast swath of southeast Lebanon. For more than three decades the Zohras had clung to their farm, existing in conditions of extreme poverty and privation. There was no electricity or running water. The only natural light filtering into the gloomy interior of their home came from the open door and a small glassless window. There was no chimney for the crackling fire in the corner, leaving the room filled with dense acrid smoke and the ceiling of tin sheets black with soot. Swarms of flies and wasps surrounded the entrance, attracted by piles of fresh goat dung. The family slept each night on the rough earthen floor beside black plastic bags containing their clothes and sacks of lentils, rice, salt, and wheat.
Provisions had to be brought from Kfar Shuba village, a five-mile drive, for the most part along a rutted dirt track. Part of the route followed the old Israeli military patrol road, affording visitors to Bastara the bizarre experience of driving along an Israeli-built road with signs in Hebrew while peering through the nine-foot-high chain-link fence into south Lebanon. It was easy to forget that the road was on Lebanese territory.
Although the Israelis had permitted the family to stay in Bastara during the occupation, the Zohras faced routine harassment, such as the destruction of olive trees, restricted movements, even the theft of goats. “They kicked us out of my old home in Mazraat Qafwa [another of the Shebaa Farms] and blew up the buildings when they invaded in 1967,” Mohammed Zohra, the family’s elderly patriarch, told me. “I owned the land here in Bastara, so I brought my family here. I was not going to move out again.”
But by October 2000, the Zohra family’s austere but peaceful existence came to an abrupt end as they suddenly found themselves in the middle of a new war zone.
Six weeks after the abduction of the three Israeli soldiers, Hezbollah detonated two roadside bombs against Israeli army jeeps on the edge of the Shebaa Farms. Two soldiers were slightly hurt. Ten days later, another roadside bomb was detonated against a motorized patrol, wounding two more soldiers. It was now obvious that the abduction of the soldiers was not an isolated operation but marked the beginning of a new campaign against the Israelis in the Shebaa Farms. The Israeli army ordered Hezbollah’s old foe, the Egoz commando unit, back to the northern border, a deployment that did not go unnoticed. In a commentary on Al-Manar television, viewers were reminded how the Egoz was “torn apart” during the years of occupation by the Islamic Resistance. “In any case,” the commentary concluded, “we can’t but tell the Egoz unit, welcome to hell once again.”
A day after the second IED attack, Qassem Zohra, Mohammed’s nephew, who ran the family, struck a tone of defiance. “We have lived like this for thirty years and we will continue to live here until all our land is liberated,” he said, sitting on a log beside an open fire outside his home. “We all support the resistance and are ready to fight with them.”
It took one glass of tea and three cigarettes before Qassem displayed his true feelings. “Finally, we were liberated,” he said, staring at the ground and shaking his thick, shaggy black hair, “but now we are worse off than before. We sometimes take our flocks into the hills, but the Israelis shoot at us and we never know if we will come back alive. If there is fighting here, we’re stuck in the middle. Doesn’t the army want to come here to the border to calm things down?”
But the plight of one impoverished family was of no consequence to the powers that sanctioned the Shebaa Farms campaign. In December, two of Qassem’s children were nearly killed when Israeli mortar shells exploded near them as they tended their goats. In early January 2001, Israeli shelling in response to an unclaimed mortar attack slaughtered more than sixty goats in Bastara. The family fled, but returned days later, complaining that they had been unable to find alternative grazing. At the end of January, three PFLP-GC fighters on reconnaissance patrol near Bastara were spotted by the Israelis and attacked by helicopters and tanks. Two of the Palestinians were killed. The clash was the final straw for the beleaguered Zohra family. “We could hear the shrapnel [from exploding shells] hitting the roof,” Qassem told me. “The children hid under the mattresses because they were so scared.” Once more they packed their bags, and this time they left for good.
A pattern soon emerged for this new conflict. Hezbollah struck at Israeli forces in the Shebaa Farms on a periodic basis in a finely tuned “balance of terror” designed to keep the Israelis on edge but without triggering a full-scale war. “When we took the decision to continue the resistance, we took into account all possibilities,” Sheikh Nabil Qawq told me in an interview days after the second IED attack. “If Israel stages a large-scale attack, it will not be to their benefit. Our aim is not to have a wide-scale war. Our aim is to liberate our land and free our detainees.”
Yet the Shebaa Farms campaign stripped Hezbollah of the internationally recognized legitimacy it had earned battling Israeli occupation forces in south Lebanon, validated by the 1996 April Understanding. Then, Israel had been an illegal occupier of Lebanese sovereign territory; and while its occupation of the Shebaa Farms was also judged illegal, according to UN Security Council resolutions, because it was regarded as Syrian land, Israel had officially withdrawn from Lebanese soil, thus making Hezbollah’s attacks across the Blue Line impermissible.
Hezbollah also faced a domestic challenge to its arms. The Israeli withdrawal inevitably ended the national consensus on Hezbollah’s right to resist Israel. With the Israelis gone, Hezbollah’s critics argued, only the Lebanese state should bear arms in defense of the nation and decide matters of war and peace, not a movement drawn from just one sect that owed its ideological allegiance to the leader of another country. Furthermore, the rate of one attack every month or so was insufficient to compel Israel to cede the territory. Instead, the sporadic campaign needlessly antagonized a powerful enemy and was nothing but a cynical
ploy to defer Hezbollah’s disarmament. But Hezbollah made no apology for the limited pace of attacks, noting that the strategic concept for the Shebaa Farms campaign was very different from the effort to liberate the occupied south.
“We estimated that the Shebaa Farms did not require more from the resistance than reminder operations separate in time because we are not a regular army that attacks, takes positions, and defends positions. If we had fired on a regular basis, it would have been a useless exchange of fire,” Sheikh Naim Qassem told me.
A Shift of Resistance
The abduction of the three Israeli soldiers and Elhanan Tannenbaum heralded not only Hezbollah’s campaign to liberate the Shebaa Farms but also its new military strategy for the postwithdrawal phase. Israel’s withdrawal from south Lebanon necessitated a change in Hezbollah’s strategic and tactical behavior to take into consideration the new circumstances on the ground and the evolving geopolitical climate in the Middle East.
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