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Copyright � 2002 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
By night, Israelis stalk Palestinians
Edward Cody The Washington Post
Friday, May 17, 2002
A pattern resumes in focused attacks
HALHOUL, West Bank At 1 a.m. under a chilly spring rain, the streets of Halhoul lay
silent and apparently deserted.
Hassan Abu Zalata recalled that he and a colleague in the Palestinian intelligence
agency, Ahmed Zaerah Madhiah, left their car parked on a narrow lane alongside a
mosque and walked a few meters to take a cell phone call. Their chief, Khalid Abu
Khairan, remained behind in the car with another intelligence officer, watching and
listening in the blackness.
The four were on late-night patrol in this West Bank city, 30 kilometers (18 miles)
south of Jerusalem. They had heard reports that the Israeli troops who tightly
surround Halhoul were about to enter the city. But the reports had been checked
and, headquarters radioed back, seemed doubtful. The four intelligence agents
nevertheless remained on alert from their vantage point near the little stone mosque.
That, Abu Zalata recounted, was when the Israeli soldiers sprang their ambush. It
was the latest in a series of almost nightly raids targeting people accused of
involvement in terrorism. Such attacks have been pursued in the West Bank with
little publicity since the end of Israel's large-scale offensive.
>From atop the mosque and from the positions beside and just behind it, he said, the
Israeli soldiers sprayed the car with automatic-rifle fire, immediately killing Abu
Khairan with explosive bullets that punctured his head and back.
"I didn't see anything. I just heard the shooting," Abu Zalata said. "I had a pistol,
but I
didn't pull it out. I ran to jump over a wall. Then Ahmed was hit, and he fell." The
man
had been fatally shot.
The gunfire continued for about 15 minutes, Abu Zalata said, giving an account that
was essentially confirmed by other Palestinians here. When it was over, he said, he
peered over the wall and saw Israeli soldiers pull Abu Khairan's body out of the car,
check his identity card against a piece of paper they carried and cover his head with
a floor mat.
After making a similar check of the other dead man's identity, Abu Zalata said, one of
the soldiers picked up the slain Palestinian's radio and, in accented Arabic, taunted
the Palestinian intelligence service over its own radio network.
"This is Ashraf," he said, according to Abu Zalata's recollection. "I have just killed
two
of your people, and we are now going to withdraw. You [expletives] can come and
get the bodies. We will be back and kill more of you."
With that, the Israeli soldiers left, having accomplished another of the tightly
focused
attacks, usually carried out by special units operating in small numbers. They have
become, in effect, a target-by-target continuation of a monthlong operation that
allows soldiers to arrest or kill Palestinian militants accused of involvement in
attacks
or planned attacks on Israelis.
According to Israeli reports, the attacks are often mounted on the basis of
information squeezed out of Palestinians taken into custody during the broad
campaign that began March 29 and ended with the pullout from Bethlehem last
Friday.
On Tuesday night, for instance, as Israeli forces killed the two intelligence agents
here, other Israeli soldiers arrested a dozen Palestinians in Dura, a few kilometers to
the south, and an official of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, in the city
of Hebron, adjacent to Halhoul.
The operations have been relatively easy to carry out, because the Israeli Army, in
pulling out from Palestinian city centers and refugee camps, did not go very far.
Soldiers backed by tanks and armored personnel carriers encircle all major
Palestinian population centers. They are stationed in areas designated for full Israeli
control under the Oslo peace accords and in areas designated for Palestinian
administration but Israeli security control.
That leaves only areas designated for Palestinian security control, mostly the city
centers that make up about 20 percent of the West Bank, free of full-time Israeli
military posts. But people in these areas remain under tight supervision by Israeli
soldiers at checkpoints along major roads in and out of town.
"We are checking people coming and going much more closely than before," said
Lieutenant Colonel Olivier Rafowicz, an army spokesman in Jerusalem.
The Israeli defense minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, said Tuesday that troops making
such checks and arrests had prevented 15 attempted suicide bombings since the
end the operation.
A Palestinian human rights organization, LAW, described the shootings of Abu
Khairan and Zaerah Madhiah as assassinations. The group was joined in that
accusation by Nabil Abu Irdineh, a spokesman for Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian
leader.The Israeli government acknowledges it has carried out a number of such
shootings, which it calls targeted killings. But Abu Khairan and Zaerah Madhiah, the
army said, were killed because they tried to flee troops who were seeking to arrest
them.
Abu Zalata escaped as did the agent who was in the car with Abu Khairan, according
to Israelis and Palestinians.
Israeli military spokesmen said the two slain agents were responsible for a number of
attacks on Israelis. Abu Zalata denied that he and the dead men were involved in
terrorism, saying they were all security professionals.
Copyright � 2002 The International Herald Tribune
End<{{{
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