Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  While Hezbollah was preoccupied with the Shebaa Farms, a more worrying development emerged when unidentified militants began staging attacks across the Blue Line directly into Israel. They were scrappy and amateurish for the most part: a handful of rocket-propelled grenades fired at an IDF border post or a pair of old 107 mm rockets sailing across the border. Several Palestinians—“disorganized individuals,” a Lebanese army officer told me—were caught in possession of rockets.

  Yet by the second week, it appeared that what had begun as a controlled escalation was slipping out of control, to Hezbollah’s apparent discomfort. When militants attacked an IDF border post one afternoon, an eyewitness told me he saw several startled Hezbollah men leave their own observation post, jump into a car, and chase the fleeing attackers down a valley.

  Even Yasser Arafat sent a message to President Emile Lahoud grumbling that the fighting along Israel’s northern border was drawing international attention away from the beleaguered Palestinians in the West Bank.

  Sensing that the situation was growing unpredictable, Nasrallah chose to ease tensions by announcing that widening the conflict with Israel “all the way from the [Mediterranean] sea to Mount Hermon” would not take place at this time. That option, he said, was being held in reserve in the event that Israel expelled the Palestinians from the occupied territories.

  After two weeks, the offensive had played its course, and all sides began to de-escalate.

  Although the April offensive came close to upsetting the “balance of terror,” the outcome was more than satisfying for Hezbollah and Syria. Hezbollah had flexed its resistance muscles and burnished its reputation as the spearhead of the struggle against Israel, while Syria had demonstrated once again that it remained essential to stability along Israel’s northern border. The violence along the Lebanon-Israel border successfully diverted some international attention from the West Bank to Damascus. Dick Cheney, the U.S. vice president, had held a “polite and courteous” phone conversation with Assad, and the fighting had forced Colin Powell, the U.S. secretary of state, to readjust his schedule for a planned trip to the Middle East to include Beirut and Damascus on his itinerary.4

  Significantly, the outcome hardened the view within Hezbollah and in Damascus that Israel had gone soft, that it was no longer the feisty, belligerent nation of soldier-settlers that had crushed and humiliated the Arabs, smashing their armies and seizing their land. Now the average young Israeli looked for a lucrative career in finance or technology rather than serving in the military or living the ascetic life of a kibbutznik. Even Ariel Sharon, that old Jewish warrior, had chosen to overrule his own cabinet when midway through the crisis it had voted by a margin of one for forceful military action against Lebanon. Sharon, who himself had voted in favor of heavy retaliation, decided that a one-vote majority was insufficient to launch reprisals that risked developing into a war with Syria.

  Hezbollah took encouragement and satisfaction from what it perceived was the crumbling morale of the Israeli people as the Al-Aqsa intifada raged on. Israel’s frail economy, the slump in the number of tourists, and the growing polarization between Israelis calling for a withdrawal from the occupied territories and those demanding harsher action against the Palestinians merely strengthened Hezbollah’s conviction that the Jewish state could be defeated through resistance and jihad.

  “Israel is exploding from inside,” Sheikh Nabil Qawq told me in February 2002. “Tel Aviv is turning into a city of ghosts. The Israelis have lost confidence in their leaders and their army.… The only and lasting way for the Arab people is the path of resistance.”

  Subversive Activities

  While the attacks in the Shebaa Farms captured the headlines and provoked speculation on the possibilities of a new front opening, Hezbollah also waged a more insidious and covert war across the Blue Line. Even before the May 2000 Israeli withdrawal, Hezbollah had begun making contacts with Israeli Arab communities in Galilee in order to build a network of intelligence-gathering cells. The program accelerated following the Israeli withdrawal when Hezbollah deployed into the border district and co-opted some of the cross-border drug smuggling networks. Hezbollah’s intelligence penetration of Israel was well planned, multitiered, and conducted with a high degree of professionalism, ruefully acknowledged by Western and Israeli intelligence officials.

  In exchange for cash and narcotics, such as Lebanese hashish, or cocaine and heroin refined in secret laboratories in the northern Bekaa Valley, the Israeli Arab agents provided Hezbollah with valuable intelligence on Israel’s northern border, including details of IDF outposts, the number of troops deployed, ambush locations along the border fence, surveillance and reconnaissance measures, personal details about IDF officers, and maps and photographs of military installations. The tactical intelligence was fed into potential plans for cross-border penetrations, abductions, and localized attacks.

  Hezbollah also gathered detailed operational intelligence on facilities, military and civilian, throughout Israel to be included in a target bank for potential rocket strikes or bomb attacks in a future war. These facilities included IDF bases, government institutions, and industrial centers as well as major road junctions, towns, and cities.

  On a strategic level, Hezbollah sought intelligence about Israeli politics, economy, and society. Some of Hezbollah’s agents were tasked with gathering seemingly mundane information, such as statistical annuals, telephone directories, reference books, and periodicals. Along with the activities of the party’s Hebrew speakers in the Hebrew Observation Department at Al-Manar television who trawl Israeli newspapers, television, and radio each day, the information provided by the network of agents inside Israel helped Hezbollah build a more comprehensive and thorough picture of how Israel works in order to better analyze future moves by Israel as well as to predict potential Israeli reactions to attacks.

  In tandem with the direct intelligence-gathering operations using the cross-border drug smuggling connections, trained Hezbollah intelligence officers traveled abroad seeking to recruit university-educated Israeli Arabs attending conferences and even the annual pilgrimage, or Hajj, when the Muslim faithful travel to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

  The favorite location for exchanging drugs, information, and cash was in the northern—Lebanese—two-thirds of Ghajar, which remained unfenced from the southern one-third of the village under Israeli control. Ghajar, described by one Israeli army officer as Israel’s “soft underbelly,” was a persistent worry on account of its vulnerability to penetration from the Lebanese side and the doubtful loyalties of its residents.

  Initially, access to Ghajar from Lebanon was blocked because of the presence of a UNIFIL position beside a gate in the old Israeli security fence that encircled the northern tip of the village. But in August 2001, UNIFIL relocated its observation post to a new site a hundred yards farther south. Suddenly, anyone could drive through the gate and follow the dilapidated former Israeli patrol road on the southern side of the fence straight into the northern end of Ghajar. To the alarm of the Israelis and the Alawite residents, the first visitors were from Hezbollah. A dozen or so fighters erected a white tent on the outskirts of the village and turned an old bomb shelter built from blocks of black basalt into a command post. The new Hezbollah position beside the village renewed speculation that the Israelis would divide Ghajar with a security fence, a move vigorously opposed by the residents. Apart from Hezbollah militants, the only other visitors to the village were curious Lebanese reporters. Neither group was made particularly welcome by the villagers.

  “Israel is making it very difficult for us because of you coming here,” said Bassem Khatib to a group of us who wandered into the village one August morning. “When the Israeli soldiers see someone coming into Ghajar they close the gate at the [southern] entrance to the village and we are stuck here. It doesn’t matter if someone is sick, they won’t open the gate to let them out.”

  Most residents studiously ignored us. A young girl hurried past. Wou
ld she stop and talk for a moment? “Talk? About what?” she replied, with a nervous smile and an apologetic half shrug.

  A convoy of cars drove slowly past, kicking up a cloud of white dust. Stony-faced men, some with shaved heads and wearing black wraparound sunglasses, scowled at us through the windows.

  “Israeli mukhabarat,” whispered one of the Lebanese journalists.

  A car drove up from the southern end of the village and a cameraman and his colleague climbed out. “Hi, we’re from Channel Two,” said the cameraman cheerfully, referring to Israel’s leading television station. He shouldered his camera and began filming. The Lebanese reporters accompanying me glanced at each other uneasily as they realized that their faces would be splashed all over Israeli television that evening. It is illegal for Lebanese to have any contact with Israel.

  “How did you get into the village?” the cameraman asked, apparently unaware that he had crossed the Blue Line and was standing on Lebanese soil. The Israeli and Lebanese cameramen stood two yards apart and filmed each other filming each other in part of a village that lay inside Lebanon but whose residents considered themselves Syrian nationals even though they held Israeli citizenship. Such was the unusual position in which Ghajar found itself.

  The encounter with the Israeli camera crew underlined just how easy it was to smuggle goods or information from Lebanon into Israel through Ghajar. Before long, the Hezbollah fighters began barring visitors from entering the village. Their command post in the old bomb shelter was festooned with yellow Hezbollah flags and camouflage netting slung over the entrance.

  A Hezbollah man accompanied me on a stroll down the side of the village to the new security fence along the Blue Line. Little stirred in Ghajar. A few children played in a street, and a couple of elderly residents stared blankly at us. No one attempted to strike up a conversation. Across the hot, grassy plain a few hundred yards to the southeast lay a large Israeli compound, a line of Merkava tanks and armored personnel carriers baking in the scorching sun.

  Did the Hezbollah fighter and his comrades have any contact with the residents of Ghajar?

  “No,” he said. “It’s forbidden.”

  By whom?

  “Orders,” he replied.

  “The Alliance of Blood Is Coming Apart”

  That was not exactly true. In September 2002, the Israeli authorities broke up the biggest spy ring yet. Altogether, eleven Israeli Arabs were detained, six of them serving with the Israeli army, including the leader of the ring, Omar Hayeb, a lieutenant colonel. Ironically, Hayeb had lost an eye to a Hezbollah roadside bomb in 1996. The lure of cash and hard drugs evidently overcame any lingering resentment Hayeb might have felt toward his former adversaries. He was recruited in late 2000 by Ramzi Nohra’s brother, Kamil. According to a Lebanese intelligence source, Ramzi ran the cell in coordination with a Hezbollah intelligence officer, while Kamil was the link man to Hayeb.

  In exchange for cash and drugs, Hayeb fulfilled requests for items and information, such as large-scale maps of the Shebaa Farms and northern Golan Heights and details of Israeli army compounds along the border, including surveillance equipment used on the bases. Hezbollah even attempted to obtain and crack the Israeli army’s radio encryption code, dubbed Otiyot, Hebrew for “letters.”5

  The exposure of the Hayeb spy ring stunned the Israeli army and sent a tremor of unease throughout Israeli society. “When a high-ranking officer, a scion of a loyal and well-rooted community, one of the system’s darlings, one of the most senior signatories to the alliance of blood between us [Jews] and those [Arabs] who live among us, forsakes IDF soldiers with such ease to the graces of Hezbollah—that is a sign that something fundamental has gone awry. The alliance of blood is coming apart at the seams,” wrote the Israeli columnist Ben Caspit in the Maariv daily.6

  With the discovery of the Omar Hayeb espionage cell in September 2002, Israel’s patience with Ramzi Nohra appears to have run out. During the eight years he had cooperated with Hezbollah and the military intelligence services of Syria and Lebanon, Ramzi had played roles in some of the most sophisticated and successful operations waged against Israel—the capture of Ahmad Hallaq in 1996, the assassination of General Erez Gerstein in 1999, the abduction of the three Israeli soldiers from the Shebaa Farms in 2000, and the handling of drugs-for-intelligence spy rings in Israel following the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. The Israelis decided it was time to settle accounts.

  On the morning of December 6, 2002, Ramzi, accompanied by his thirty-year-old nephew Elie Issa, drove his Mercedes out of Ibl es-Saqi village and turned right onto the main road heading north. He had driven barely two miles from his home when a rock-disguised IED exploded beside his vehicle. Both Ramzi and Issa were killed instantly.

  As soon as the news of the assassination broke, a team from Hezbollah hurriedly drove to Ramzi’s home and locked one of the rooms in his villa, according to a Lebanese intelligence source. What was in the room remains unknown, but Ramzi held many secrets that Hezbollah and others would prefer stay hidden.

  Nasrallah, attending Issa’s funeral in the Bekaa Valley, vowed to “cut off the criminal terrorist hand that reached this martyr and the martyr Ramzi.” And revenge was swift in coming. Two days after Ramzi’s death, a powerful roadside bomb exploded beside the border fence in the western sector as an Israeli army Humvee passed by. The two soldiers in the vehicle were badly wounded; one of them lost both his legs in the blast. A statement claiming responsibility was released in Beirut by the “Ramzi Nohra Martyr Group.” Hezbollah denied any knowledge, although no one doubted that the party had perpetrated the attack, just as it was obvious that Israel was responsible for killing Ramzi.

  Even though Israel remained silent about Ramzi’s death, Hezbollah and others who closely followed the cycle of violence in south Lebanon recognized an implicit claim of responsibility in the location the assassins selected for the roadside bomb attack. For Ramzi Nohra died in exactly the same place as the IED explosion nearly four years earlier that had killed General Gerstein.

  Water Wars

  Israel’s own actions along the border sometimes played into Hezbollah’s hands, helping the organization make its case for retaining its arms. The most intrusive example was the near daily overflights in Lebanese airspace, which had resumed following the abduction of the three soldiers in October 2000. Israel’s sensitivity over its water resources also created a series of unnecessary crises between 2001 and 2002, swiftly seized by Hezbollah as evidence of Israel’s ill intentions toward Lebanon.

  In March 2001, the Lebanese government installed a small pump and a pipe to supply drinking water to the tiny village of Wazzani from the nearby spring that bubbles up into the Hasbani River. The Hasbani flows into Israel two miles south of the spring, where it forms one of three tributaries of the Jordan River, which runs into the Sea of Galilee, Israel’s largest source of fresh water.

  Although Israel had been informed of the pumping project a month earlier, the Israeli government issued a flurry of warnings against Lebanese attempts to divert water and threatened to destroy the new pumping station. The fuss died down when the UN pointed out to the Israelis that the pipe was only four inches in diameter. But three months later, Hussein Abdullah, a local landowner, inadvertently roiled the waters when he began installing a six-inch-diameter pipe to irrigate his farmland. The Israelis cried foul once more and warned that continued pumping from the Hasbani River could trigger a confrontation between Lebanon and Israel.

  In the blinding heat of summer, the only source of water for the Hasbani River was the Wazzani spring, a tranquil pool of shallow water some twenty yards across, strewn with black basalt boulders and shaded by oleander and eucalyptus trees. Years earlier, the Israelis had installed two small pumps at the spring to provide drinking water for Ghajar, which lies adjacent on the eastern bank of the Hasbani. The Lebanese authorities had allowed the pumping to continue after the Israeli withdrawal, presumably because the recipients of the water were Syria
n Alawites rather than Jewish Israelis.

  When Lebanon announced in the summer of 2002 that it was expanding the project by installing a larger pipe to convey water to some sixty villages, Ariel Sharon called it a casus belli and warned that the pumping station could be destroyed if the project went ahead.

  Such inflammatory rhetoric was a godsend for Hezbollah. Nasrallah cautioned Israel that it would fall into an “unrelenting death mill … from village to village, house to house and canyon to canyon” if it proceeded with its plans to attack the pumping site.7

  The UN and the United States were dragged into the dispute and attempted to mediate a solution. Ultimately, Lebanon was within its rights to draw off some of the water, and there was nothing Israel could do about it. What should have been a minor infrastructure project was inflated into a national celebration when the pumping facility was formally inaugurated in September 2002. Before a crowd of thousands, President Emile Lahoud turned on the tap, washed his hands, and drank some of the water as hundreds of balloons were released and carried by the gentle evening breeze toward the grassy slopes of the Golan Heights.

  “The Battle Is Open with Israel”

  While the Shebaa Farms was the designated “hot” zone for combat operations, Hezbollah constantly devised new tactics to keep the Israelis on edge elsewhere along the border. These tactics were sufficiently subtle and low-key to stay within the rules of the game and prevent an unwanted escalation while at the same time robust enough to reinforce Hezbollah’s deterrence posture and preserve the “balance of terror.” The tactics were steadily refined between 2000 and 2006 as the rules of the game evolved.

  “The battle is open with Israel,” Sheikh Naim Qassem explained to me in 2004. “We are not supposed to make them comfortable. It is a basic rule of combat to make the enemy nervous. And we try to achieve this with whatever tool we have at our disposal, be it political or military. Israel must understand that the resistance is present and watching and can reach them at any time.”