In Israel, leaders struggle with targeted killings

By Laura Blumenfeld

updated 3:10 a.m. ET Aug. 27, 2006

TEL AVIV - Israel's top military commander sat on the edge of his bed, talking on the phone, rubbing his forehead. The bedroom door was closed, muffling the Saturday clink and giggle of his children at lunch. His chief of operations was on the gray, secure phone, the line that rang louder and sharper and made his heart beat fast.

The report came from the war room: The bomb was falling.

Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon stared at the tiles on his floor, working out two plans: 1) If they die. 2) If they don't. The bomb -- the one he'd been arguing over and deliberating all day -- was plunging 10,000 feet from an Israeli F-16 toward a Palestinian house in the Gaza Strip, where guests sat, eating rice and boiled chicken. Yaalon was hoping, he recalled in an interview, that it would be their last lunch. With targeted killings, it was rarely that simple.

It was Sept. 6, 2003, a time -- much like today -- of open warfare between Israel and Hamas, which Israel, the United States and Europe have labeled a terrorist group, and which now controls the Palestinian Authority. Eight Hamas leaders had gathered to plan terrorist attacks, Israeli intelligence reported.

"It was like bin Laden, Zarqawi and Zawahiri in a meeting, and having the capability to hit them," said Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, then the air force chief, and now the military chief of staff.

The Hamas leaders had gathered in a private home, in a crowded neighborhood, when the children were out of school. A massive strike would mean civilian casualties. "We had to decide if we're going to take them out or not," said Halutz, who said he supervised 80 to 100 targeted killings as head of the air force, "with a 90 percent success rate."

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In Israel, targeted killing has become a select weapon. In Lebanon last month, Israel targeted a bunker that officials believed held Hezbollah's leadership, pounding it with 23 tons of explosives. The hit list in Gaza, Halutz said in an interview, consists of 15 names.

"It is the most important, the most important, method of fighting terror," Halutz said.

It is also, arguably, the most morally complicated. Since the beginning of 2006, Israel has targeted and killed 18 Palestinian fighters, according to B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. Fifteen civilians were also killed, the group said.

"We face a tragic dilemma," said Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, chief of military intelligence. "A terrorist is going to enter a restaurant and blow up 20 people. But if we blow up his car, three innocent people in the car will die. How do we explain it to ourselves?"

One morning in 2002, Yadlin recalled, he "woke up horrified" to learn that 15 Palestinian civilians had been killed in an operation. That afternoon, Yadlin called Asa Kasher, a philosophy professor, and began working on ethical guidelines for fighting terrorism. They also asked a mathematician to write a formula to determine acceptable civilian casualties per dead terrorist.

On Sept. 6, a year later, when Israel had the chance to destroy the Hamas leadership, security officials clashed profoundly over the algebra of assassination. Two officials who have been called Israel's leaders in combating terrorism took opposite sides. Avi Dichter, then the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency, pushed for an all-out assault against the Hamas gathering. "They're the terrorist dream team," Dichter argued.

But for Yaalon, military chief of staff from 2002 to 2005, the Talmudic precept, "If he comes to kill you, kill him first," conflicted with a Biblical commandment, "Thou shall not kill."

'There are no good answers'
Three years later, the men -- much like the society they come from -- are still engaged in debate. "It's still open between us," Dichter said, throwing a scolding look at Yaalon, during a December 2005 forum at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "This isn't settled."

Afterward, in an interview, Yaalon looked out the window and said with a sigh: "There are no good answers."

As chief of staff, Yaalon carried a pad called "the Notebook." Targets were drawn from the pool of names in the pad, a number that ranged from 300 to 1,000 wanted men, he said. Every militant group is color-coded -- red, black, green. When a target was hit, Yaalon drew an X across his page.

"It's the lives of Israelis on one hand, the lives of Palestinians on the other," Yaalon said, balancing his palms like the scales of justice. He is a tall, balding man, with sloping shoulders, thick glasses and a taste for meditative poetry. As a youth, Yaalon joined the leftist kibbutz movement. Despite decades of fighting, he still seems startled by its viciousness.

"When I sign the orders," he said, "my hand trembles."

Dichter said as he read the intelligence.

It was Friday morning, Sept. 5, 2003. Dichter had been handed a secret report stating that Hamas's senior bombmakers, strategists and developers of the Qassam rocket would meet the following day. They were marked men. They had surrounded themselves with children, lived in cellars, moved only at night and had stopped using cars or the phone.

"Why would they risk it?" Dichter recalled thinking, about their meeting. "We suspected it's not true." As head of Shin Bet, Dichter, a sturdy, dynamic, slate-eyed man, who prefers quips to poetry, was busy that morning with other targets: a Hamas fighter and a rocket operator.

Then another source called, confirming the gathering. Dichter mobilized a task force -- wiretapping experts, spy drone technicians, Palestinian informants -- and said: "Separate the signal from the static."

Dichter also notified Yaalon, the military chief of staff, who called Shaul Mofaz, then the defense minister. Yaalon asked Mofaz for permission to plan a hit. Mofaz recalled telling Yaalon: "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity -- I approve." But Mofaz had seen the maps; the neighborhood was impenetrable. "I said, 'How are you going to do it?' "

In the prime minister's office, Maj. Gen. Yoav Gallant, the military secretary, informed Ariel Sharon. The prime minister banged the table with an open palm, Gallant said. "Get them," Sharon ordered. "This is the most important operation."

It was an operation, for Yaalon, that had evolved from an earlier meeting with an earlier prime minister. In the fall of 2000, when Palestinian-Israeli violence erupted, Yaalon approached Prime Minister Ehud Barak with an idea. Instead of imposing restrictions on all Palestinians, they should launch "surgical operations" against terrorists. Yaalon suggested setting up a joint command post for Shin Bet and the military.

"It wasn't something new -- we were in this business," Barak said in an interview. In 1973, in Beirut, wearing high heels and a woman's wig, Barak helped gun down three of the terrorists who murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. "I was a brunette, I had a strawberry blonde behind me," Barak said, with a small smile.

As military chief of staff in the early 1990s, Barak had organized undercover units called "Cherry" and "Samson," soldiers who dressed like Arabs and killed Palestinians suspected of violence.

When Barak reactivated targeted killings in 2000, he said, "the first were urgent, but after, I said, 'We need rules.' " An aide exhumed four typed pages in a dusty, plastic sleeve, Barak said. They were the rules of engagement for the avengers of the 1972 Munich massacre.

Barak also secretly asked Daniel Reisner, a legal adviser to Arab-Israeli peace talks, to determine whether targeted killings were legal. Reisner agonized for six weeks. "It was a feeling of -- what on Earth has happened?" Reisner recalled. "Instead of two states living amicably side by side, I have to write opinions on how and when we kill each other."

Reisner concluded it was legal, with six conditions: that arrest is impossible; that targets are combatants; that senior cabinet members approve each attack; that civilian casualties are minimized; that operations are limited to areas not under Israeli control; and that targets are identified as a future threat. Unlike prison sentences, targeted killing cannot be meted out as punishment for past behavior, Reisner said. In 2002, a military panel established that targeting cannot be for revenge, but only for deterrence. A panelist said it took six months and 20 meetings to reach that conclusion.

"It's not an eye for an eye," Dichter said. "It's having him for lunch before he has you for dinner."

By dinnertime on Sept. 5, 2003, Dichter's intelligence network had narrowed the location of the Hamas summit. Only two Hamas members were trusted enough by the leadership to host the meeting. One lived in a private home, the other in a 12-story apartment building. It was 8 p.m. on Friday when Dichter placed a conference call.

"I'll be back in a few minutes," Mofaz, the defense minister, said to his wife and four children on Friday evening, as he ran from the table to pick up the gray, coded phone. He had just recited the blessings over the wine and challah bread.

Yaalon, also on the conference call, said the air force was preparing a plan, "Operation Automatic Gear." For Israelis, 2003 had been a bloody summer. Terrorists blew themselves up at grocery stores, at bus stops and on buses, including one packed with children. Israel declared Hamas's political and military leaders fair game.

Mofaz told Dichter and Yaalon, "Tomorrow may be a historic day."

Yaalon recalled going to bed doubtful that they would attack; intelligence often unraveled. He said nothing about it to his wife. Dichter recalled going to bed confident he would find the location -- but what about the civilians in the 12-story building? He also said nothing about it to his wife.

By 6 a.m. on Sept. 6, Dichter was driving to the command center, a windowless room that glowed with computer screens and smelled of the Friday-night leftovers that agents had brought in -- chocolate rugelach and egg salad.

"The intelligence was good, the mood was good," he recalled. By tracking delivery trucks and following guards, Dichter said, Israeli agents determined that the Hamas meeting would take place at the single-family house, not the 12-story apartment building. Dichter felt relieved. Engineers ran computer analyses to prepare the house for destruction, assessing the cement, the structure and the size of the rooms.

Yaalon also woke up early and anxious. If Dichter was intuitive, Yaalon was analytical. The chief of staff jogged down to the Mediterranean and crashed into the waves. He swam out half a mile, pushing against the swells, and contemplated the day's decisions. "It kept my head busy with fresh oxygen," Yaalon said.

Almost every day, Yaalon had to decide who would live or die. "Who is a 'ticking bomb'? Can we arrest him? Who is a priority -- this guy first, or this guy first?" Yaalon recalled. Once a week, military intelligence and Shin Bet proposed new names. At first, the list was limited to bombers themselves, but several years later it expanded to those who manufacture bombs and those who plan attacks.

"I called it 'cutting weeds.' I knew their names by heart," Yaalon said. How many did he kill? "Oh, hundreds, hundreds. I knew them. I had all the details with their pictures, maps, intelligence, on the table. Where does he live? What is his routine? Is he married? How many children did he have? If he had lots of kids, it crossed my mind."

It was hard to fathom, Yaalon said: "It became a routine to look into their eyes in the photo. In certain cases it's unbelievable -- he looks so naive, a young guy looks nice, a baby face, especially a 16-year-old suicide bomber. It's beyond imagination."

Reisner, the legal expert, was often consulted at the meetings, which he described as "very, very trying. Especially when I said it's okay. I'd go back to my office and ask my deputy, 'Do you agree?' It's a frightening process to be involved in, sitting in a room and talking about killing someone. It's enough to make your skin crawl."

But once the evidence was presented, Reisner said, when they identified the cafe the terrorist was planning to blow up, or the movie theater he hoped to destroy, "you're reminded of what you're trying to avoid."

Complicated process
When the prime minister approves a target -- a requirement that can take months -- the name is transferred from the Notebook to a shortlist typed on a laminated card. Commanders carry the card in their pockets, along with bus passes and keys. Each target is assigned a file, with instructions on when and where he can be killed. Specialists mark up maps -- green lines for open roads where killings minimize civilian risk, red lines for congested areas to be avoided, Yaalon said. An operation can take 200 people, thousands of man hours, and cost $1 million, Halutz said.

When a target is hit, Reisner said, the feeling is "complicated."

Not for Avi Dichter. "After each success, the only thought is, 'Okay, who's next?' We really have a bottleneck," the former Shin Bet chief said. One time they completed a killing at 5:30 a.m. "I said, 'What are we going to do for the rest of the day?' Nothing limits Hamas attacks, except terrorists still prefer their heads attached to their shoulders. If the M-16 delivers the message, the F-16 delivers it better."

On Saturday morning, Sept. 6, 2003, six F-16s were waiting off the coast of Gaza. Mofaz, the defense minister, sat in his office and changed the channel on his TV from CNN to live footage of Gaza from a reconnaissance drone. By noon, several Hamas leaders had arrived at the home of Marwan Abu Ras, a religion professor who was also a Hamas activist. The Israeli cameras zoomed in to catch the details.

"Some came on foot, some came by car, some parked far away and walked," Mofaz recalled. "They covered their faces with kaffiyehs and wore flowing clothes so they'd be hard to track."

A Shin Bet agent in the command center called out the identities of the men. "It was the 'Who's Who' of Hamas," said Gabi Ashkenazi, then Yaalon's deputy. "People we'd been hunting for years."

"It got intense," Yaalon recalled. "The reports -- 'Here comes Mohammed Deif.' 'Here comes Adnan al-Ghoul.' 'Here comes Ismail Haniyeh.' They said the names, I pictured each one, and I pictured blown-up buses and disco bombings, and shootings, murders of children, and kidnapped soldiers."

Gallant, the prime minister's adviser, called Sharon at his ranch and told him about the extraordinary gathering. "We're talking about people responsible for killing hundreds of Israelis," Gallant said. "They're planning on killing hundreds more."

Sharon was setting up for his grandson's sixth birthday party. He asked, "Are the planes ready?"

In Gaza, the last Hamas member arrived in a white station wagon. Dichter himself had arrested him twice, "with these hands," he said, holding up thick, calloused fingers. It was Sheik Ahmed Yassin, a paraplegic and Hamas spiritual leader. As his wheelchair disappeared into the house, an agent called the sheik by his code name: "the Carcass."

Yaalon said to the air force chief: "Ready?"

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