Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > How Israel Used F-16s and High-Tech Soldiers to Devastate Gaza
________________________________________
How Israel Used F-16s and High-Tech Soldiers to Devastate Gaza
By Max Blumenthal [1] / Nation Books [2]
July 8, 2015
The following is an excerpt from Max Blumenthal's new book, The 51 Day War:
Ruin and Resistance in Gaza [3] (Nation Books, 2015).
46 days into Operation Protective edge in Gaza, Israel was attacking with
renewed ferocity. From my room, with the windows shut tight and the
industrial fan cranked up to maximum speed, I could still hear the roar of
F-16 jets as they coasted by, and could count the seconds before they struck
their target-perhaps a rocket launching site or maybe some innocent family's
home. I managed to drift off for a few hours before being ripped from my
sleep by a series of explosions. It was 6 a.m. and the sun was beginning to
rise over the Mediterranean.
I checked the Twitter timelines of local Gaza accounts for information on
the bombings and found that most were reporting on a strike on a four-story
home owned by Abu Hussein Kallab, a businessman in Rafah whose factory had
been destroyed in a separate strike. Over a dozen bodies had been extracted
from the rubble, including a little girl who had survived with a mouth full
of concrete shards. The ferocity of the airstrike was on par with the attack
aimed at Deif, a massive concentration of force on a single home that
suggested top-level targets were inside.
By late morning, I learned that the dead bodies extracted from the rubble
included three top Qassam Brigades commanders who had gathered inside the
building to coordinate strategy. They were Raed al-Attar, the Qassam
southern commander who oversaw operations in Rafah, his colleague, Mohammed
Abu Shamaleh, and Mohammed Barhoum. Having led several operations in the
field, including the tunnel ambush codenamed "Shattered Illusion" that
brought the Israeli tank gunner Gilad Shalit into captivity, Abu Shamaleh
was considered as a possible successor to Ahmad Jaabari when he was
assassinated in 2012. Attar, for his part, was among Gaza's most revered
figures for masterminding of the attack that captured Shalit. The deal for
Shalit's release produced wild celebration across Palestine, but
particularly in Gaza, as over a thousand prisoners were freed from Israeli
jails and reunited with their families. Attar's hero status had been
secured, as had his death sentence.
For his part, Barhoum was a veteran Qassam operative who helped coordinate
the transfer of weapons through the tunnel network at Rafah. The three
commanders played an arguably more important role than the partially
crippled Deif in the dayto-day field operations of the Qassam Brigades.
Indeed, Attar had overseen the operation to capture Lt. Hadar Goldin and was
rumored to be one of the few people in Gaza who knew the whereabouts of
Goldin's body.
With these assassinations, it seemed that the war would drag on endlessly. I
was running low on cash and with the bombs falling again, my freedom of
movement was severely compromised. That afternoon, I took a taxi to the Erez
crossing and prepared to leave Gaza for a few days.
Inside the cavernous Israeli-run terminal, as I handed my passport to a
young female COGAT administrator, she began pounding frantically on the
bulletproof glass that separated us, ordering me to take shelter. A few
seconds later, I heard something explode in the distance, likely a mortar
round or rocket fired from Beit Hanoun. Watching well-protected Israeli
soldiers panic was a surreal experience after witnessing the wholesale
destruction they wreaked across Gaza.
In the parking lot outside Erez, an Israeli news crew from Channel 1
intercepted me and peppered me with questions about what I had seen inside
Gaza. Did I see rockets fired from civilian areas? Was Hamas using human
shields? What about the tunnels? Realizing this was more an interrogation
session than an interview, I quickly found a taxi and headed straight to
Ramallah.
That same afternoon in Rafah, 15,000 mourners marched through the streets of
the war-torn southern city with the bodies of the three commanders wrapped
in green Hamas burial shrouds. On sidewalks and in squares, men cried openly
for the loss of those they saw as guardians of their city while colleagues
of the three fallen commanders offered defiant tributes to them in a local
mosque.
Attar and Abu Shamaleh had survived an assassination attempt in 2003 with
the help of local farmers who hid them in an olive grove while Apache
helicopters hunted them down. A year later, when Israeli Special Forces
raided Abu Shamaleh's home, his neighbors helped him escape through the
narrow lanes of central Rafah. This time, however, someone in the
neighborhood had furnished the men's location to Israel's Shin Bet. Someone
had been compromised by the intelligence services and induced into becoming
a collaborator.
"My dad has spent his life fighting for the liberation of Palestine and
today, my dad-they assassinated him," Abu Shamaleh's pre-teen daughter,
Raba, told a local camera crew at her father's funeral. With tears streaming
down her face, the distraught girl said, "It's all because of the
collaborators and spies! And I tell my dad, God rest his soul, we'll go
after them and we'll kill them."
The wartime anger directed at the occupier suddenly turned towards the
traitors burrowing from within. The day after Abu Shamaleh, Attar, and
Barhoum's assassination, a group of twenty-five accused collaborators that
included two women was brought before a public crowd in al-Katiba Park in
Gaza City. They appeared wearing masks, their identities concealed to guard
their families from societal castigation. And then they were lined up
against a wall and shot to death by members of the Qassam Brigades.
Photos of the execution were promptly disseminated to the media, presumably
in hopes that the images would quell the anger overflowing across Gaza, and
also as a warning to the collaborators who remained on the loose.
Netanyahu's office seized on the execution scenes to portray Hamas as a gang
of medieval fanatics no less barbaric than ISIS. By extension, he cast
himself as the leader of the Westernized outpost on the front line against
what he later described as "a world-wide network of militant Islamists" that
"all share this fanatic ideology; they all have not only unbridled ambitions
but also savage methods."
The image of spies dragged before firing squads is common throughout
history, particularly among anti-colonial and revolutionary movements. But
its appearance in Gaza exposed a depressing reality that was only discussed
in whispers. Those who were executed had likely been among the most
desperate of Gaza's dispossessed population. And before they became spies,
they had been spied upon by the Israeli surveillance and cyberwarfare outfit
known as Unit 8200.
An intelligence corps embedded within the Israeli military, Unit 8200
consists of several thousand of the army's most highly educated,
technologically sophisticated soldiers. It is, in fact, the army's largest
unit, comparable in its size and function to the US National Security Agency
(NSA). Much of Unit 8200's work entails spying on everyone from Hezbollah
and Hamas operatives to American citizens-the NSA handed over thousands of
emails and phone communications to Unit 8200 of Arab and
Palestinian-Americans, according to journalist James Bamford. In Gaza, Unit
8200 works with the Shin Bet to cultivate spies by compromising residents of
the strip who might have fallen into difficult circumstances.
In a bracing September 12, 2014 joint letter declaring their refusal to
serve any longer in the military, Unit 8200 veterans detailed how they
preyed on innocent Palestinians, exploiting the weakest and blackmailing the
most vulnerable. "If you're homosexual and know someone who knows a wanted
person, Israel will make your life miserable," one of the Unit 8200
whistle-blowers explained to a reporter at the Guardian. "If you need
emergency medical treatment in Israel, the West Bank or abroad-we searched
for you. The state of Israel will allow you to die before we let you leave
for treatment without giving information on your wanted cousin. If you
interest Unit 8200 and don't have anything to do with any hostile activity,
you're [still] an objective."
"All Palestinians are exposed to non-stop monitoring without any legal
protection," the letter read. "Any Palestinian may be targeted and may
suffer from sanctions such as the denial of permits, harassment, extortion,
or even direct physical injury." There was not a shred of sympathy to be
found anywhere in Gaza for the poor souls who had fallen into circumstances
that led them to collaborate. Though the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for
Human Rights condemned the executions of the accused spies, a clear
consensus in Gaza supported the death sentences. If I heard any dissenting
opinions around Gaza, they were from those who believed the collaborators
should not only have been executed, but brutalized as well.
Once again, Palestinians were pitted against one another through the
machinations of their occupier. Palestinians killed Palestinians who had
gotten Palestinians killed while Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas undercut the negotiating position of Hamas. Back in Tel Aviv,
Netanyahu heaped praise on Shin Bet Chief Yoram Cohen for orchestrating the
assassinations, while Amos Harel, military correspondent for the zealously
anti-Netanyahu newspaper, Haaretz, proclaimed: "Assassinations of Hamas
commanders could make Netanyahu the hero."
But Israel was hardly finished. As the war entered its denouement in the
final week of August, the military readied a series of dramatic strikes
aimed at the heart of Gaza City. The goal this time was to set the stage for
the war's aftermath by provoking Gaza's middle class against Hamas.
Reprinted with permission from Nation Books -All Rights Reserved. 2015
Max Blumenthal is a senior writer for AlterNet, and the award-winning author
of Goliath [4] and Republican Gomorrah [5]. Find him on Twitter at
@MaxBlumenthal [6].
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Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [7]
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________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/world/how-israel-used-f-16s-and-high-tech-soldiers-d
evastate-gaza
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/max-blumenthal
[2] http://www.nationbooks.org/
[3] http://www.amazon.com/The-51-Day-War-Resistance/dp/156858511X
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Goliath-Life-Loathing-Greater-Israel/dp/1568586345
[5] http://republicangomorrah.com/
[6] http://twitter.com/maxblumenthal
[7] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on How Israel Used F-16s
and High-Tech Soldiers to Devastate Gaza
[8] http://www.alternet.org/
[9] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > How Israel Used F-16s and High-Tech Soldiers to Devastate Gaza
How Israel Used F-16s and High-Tech Soldiers to Devastate Gaza
By Max Blumenthal [1] / Nation Books [2]
July 8, 2015
The following is an excerpt from Max Blumenthal's new book, The 51 Day War:
Ruin and Resistance in Gaza [3] (Nation Books, 2015).
46 days into Operation Protective edge in Gaza, Israel was attacking with
renewed ferocity. From my room, with the windows shut tight and the
industrial fan cranked up to maximum speed, I could still hear the roar of
F-16 jets as they coasted by, and could count the seconds before they struck
their target-perhaps a rocket launching site or maybe some innocent family's
home. I managed to drift off for a few hours before being ripped from my
sleep by a series of explosions. It was 6 a.m. and the sun was beginning to
rise over the Mediterranean.
I checked the Twitter timelines of local Gaza accounts for information on
the bombings and found that most were reporting on a strike on a four-story
home owned by Abu Hussein Kallab, a businessman in Rafah whose factory had
been destroyed in a separate strike. Over a dozen bodies had been extracted
from the rubble, including a little girl who had survived with a mouth full
of concrete shards. The ferocity of the airstrike was on par with the attack
aimed at Deif, a massive concentration of force on a single home that
suggested top-level targets were inside.
By late morning, I learned that the dead bodies extracted from the rubble
included three top Qassam Brigades commanders who had gathered inside the
building to coordinate strategy. They were Raed al-Attar, the Qassam
southern commander who oversaw operations in Rafah, his colleague, Mohammed
Abu Shamaleh, and Mohammed Barhoum. Having led several operations in the
field, including the tunnel ambush codenamed "Shattered Illusion" that
brought the Israeli tank gunner Gilad Shalit into captivity, Abu Shamaleh
was considered as a possible successor to Ahmad Jaabari when he was
assassinated in 2012. Attar, for his part, was among Gaza's most revered
figures for masterminding of the attack that captured Shalit. The deal for
Shalit's release produced wild celebration across Palestine, but
particularly in Gaza, as over a thousand prisoners were freed from Israeli
jails and reunited with their families. Attar's hero status had been
secured, as had his death sentence.
For his part, Barhoum was a veteran Qassam operative who helped coordinate
the transfer of weapons through the tunnel network at Rafah. The three
commanders played an arguably more important role than the partially
crippled Deif in the dayto-day field operations of the Qassam Brigades.
Indeed, Attar had overseen the operation to capture Lt. Hadar Goldin and was
rumored to be one of the few people in Gaza who knew the whereabouts of
Goldin's body.
With these assassinations, it seemed that the war would drag on endlessly. I
was running low on cash and with the bombs falling again, my freedom of
movement was severely compromised. That afternoon, I took a taxi to the Erez
crossing and prepared to leave Gaza for a few days.
Inside the cavernous Israeli-run terminal, as I handed my passport to a
young female COGAT administrator, she began pounding frantically on the
bulletproof glass that separated us, ordering me to take shelter. A few
seconds later, I heard something explode in the distance, likely a mortar
round or rocket fired from Beit Hanoun. Watching well-protected Israeli
soldiers panic was a surreal experience after witnessing the wholesale
destruction they wreaked across Gaza.
In the parking lot outside Erez, an Israeli news crew from Channel 1
intercepted me and peppered me with questions about what I had seen inside
Gaza. Did I see rockets fired from civilian areas? Was Hamas using human
shields? What about the tunnels? Realizing this was more an interrogation
session than an interview, I quickly found a taxi and headed straight to
Ramallah.
That same afternoon in Rafah, 15,000 mourners marched through the streets of
the war-torn southern city with the bodies of the three commanders wrapped
in green Hamas burial shrouds. On sidewalks and in squares, men cried openly
for the loss of those they saw as guardians of their city while colleagues
of the three fallen commanders offered defiant tributes to them in a local
mosque.
Attar and Abu Shamaleh had survived an assassination attempt in 2003 with
the help of local farmers who hid them in an olive grove while Apache
helicopters hunted them down. A year later, when Israeli Special Forces
raided Abu Shamaleh's home, his neighbors helped him escape through the
narrow lanes of central Rafah. This time, however, someone in the
neighborhood had furnished the men's location to Israel's Shin Bet. Someone
had been compromised by the intelligence services and induced into becoming
a collaborator.
"My dad has spent his life fighting for the liberation of Palestine and
today, my dad-they assassinated him," Abu Shamaleh's pre-teen daughter,
Raba, told a local camera crew at her father's funeral. With tears streaming
down her face, the distraught girl said, "It's all because of the
collaborators and spies! And I tell my dad, God rest his soul, we'll go
after them and we'll kill them."
The wartime anger directed at the occupier suddenly turned towards the
traitors burrowing from within. The day after Abu Shamaleh, Attar, and
Barhoum's assassination, a group of twenty-five accused collaborators that
included two women was brought before a public crowd in al-Katiba Park in
Gaza City. They appeared wearing masks, their identities concealed to guard
their families from societal castigation. And then they were lined up
against a wall and shot to death by members of the Qassam Brigades.
Photos of the execution were promptly disseminated to the media, presumably
in hopes that the images would quell the anger overflowing across Gaza, and
also as a warning to the collaborators who remained on the loose.
Netanyahu's office seized on the execution scenes to portray Hamas as a gang
of medieval fanatics no less barbaric than ISIS. By extension, he cast
himself as the leader of the Westernized outpost on the front line against
what he later described as "a world-wide network of militant Islamists" that
"all share this fanatic ideology; they all have not only unbridled ambitions
but also savage methods."
The image of spies dragged before firing squads is common throughout
history, particularly among anti-colonial and revolutionary movements. But
its appearance in Gaza exposed a depressing reality that was only discussed
in whispers. Those who were executed had likely been among the most
desperate of Gaza's dispossessed population. And before they became spies,
they had been spied upon by the Israeli surveillance and cyberwarfare outfit
known as Unit 8200.
An intelligence corps embedded within the Israeli military, Unit 8200
consists of several thousand of the army's most highly educated,
technologically sophisticated soldiers. It is, in fact, the army's largest
unit, comparable in its size and function to the US National Security Agency
(NSA). Much of Unit 8200's work entails spying on everyone from Hezbollah
and Hamas operatives to American citizens-the NSA handed over thousands of
emails and phone communications to Unit 8200 of Arab and
Palestinian-Americans, according to journalist James Bamford. In Gaza, Unit
8200 works with the Shin Bet to cultivate spies by compromising residents of
the strip who might have fallen into difficult circumstances.
In a bracing September 12, 2014 joint letter declaring their refusal to
serve any longer in the military, Unit 8200 veterans detailed how they
preyed on innocent Palestinians, exploiting the weakest and blackmailing the
most vulnerable. "If you're homosexual and know someone who knows a wanted
person, Israel will make your life miserable," one of the Unit 8200
whistle-blowers explained to a reporter at the Guardian. "If you need
emergency medical treatment in Israel, the West Bank or abroad-we searched
for you. The state of Israel will allow you to die before we let you leave
for treatment without giving information on your wanted cousin. If you
interest Unit 8200 and don't have anything to do with any hostile activity,
you're [still] an objective."
"All Palestinians are exposed to non-stop monitoring without any legal
protection," the letter read. "Any Palestinian may be targeted and may
suffer from sanctions such as the denial of permits, harassment, extortion,
or even direct physical injury." There was not a shred of sympathy to be
found anywhere in Gaza for the poor souls who had fallen into circumstances
that led them to collaborate. Though the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for
Human Rights condemned the executions of the accused spies, a clear
consensus in Gaza supported the death sentences. If I heard any dissenting
opinions around Gaza, they were from those who believed the collaborators
should not only have been executed, but brutalized as well.
Once again, Palestinians were pitted against one another through the
machinations of their occupier. Palestinians killed Palestinians who had
gotten Palestinians killed while Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas undercut the negotiating position of Hamas. Back in Tel Aviv,
Netanyahu heaped praise on Shin Bet Chief Yoram Cohen for orchestrating the
assassinations, while Amos Harel, military correspondent for the zealously
anti-Netanyahu newspaper, Haaretz, proclaimed: "Assassinations of Hamas
commanders could make Netanyahu the hero."
But Israel was hardly finished. As the war entered its denouement in the
final week of August, the military readied a series of dramatic strikes
aimed at the heart of Gaza City. The goal this time was to set the stage for
the war's aftermath by provoking Gaza's middle class against Hamas.
Reprinted with permission from Nation Books -All Rights Reserved. 2015
Max Blumenthal is a senior writer for AlterNet, and the award-winning author
of Goliath [4] and Republican Gomorrah [5]. Find him on Twitter at
@MaxBlumenthal [6].
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [7]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[8]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/world/how-israel-used-f-16s-and-high-tech-soldiers-d
evastate-gaza
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/max-blumenthal
[2] http://www.nationbooks.org/
[3] http://www.amazon.com/The-51-Day-War-Resistance/dp/156858511X
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Goliath-Life-Loathing-Greater-Israel/dp/1568586345
[5] http://republicangomorrah.com/
[6] http://twitter.com/maxblumenthal
[7] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on How Israel Used F-16s
and High-Tech Soldiers to Devastate Gaza
[8] http://www.alternet.org/
[9] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
