Warriors of God (35 page)

“Can you imagine what would happen if ten thousand [Lebanese] residents came and simply marched up to the Beaufort? What would we do? Shoot them?” asked an unidentified Israeli army officer of
Haaretz
. The officer noted that the Palestinian intifada a few years earlier had succeeded because of the mobilization of the masses. “As soon as the intifada is employed in the Lebanese context, we're going to have an even more difficult problem.”
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The officer could not have known at the time just how prescient were his remarks. In a little over a year, a spontaneous march by a crowd of civilians would bring the occupation to a swift and surprising conclusion.

In the days that followed the liberation of Arnoun, the crowds began to dwindle, and slowly a semblance of normality returned to the village. The Israelis had no intention of accepting the status quo, however.

After the SLA allegedly discovered six more IEDs inside an empty house on the still-occupied eastern half of the village, Israel issued a complaint to the Monitoring Group that Hezbollah was using “populated areas to launch terror operations.” It was evident that Israel was preparing the ground for retaking the village.

The new sense of despondency pervading Arnoun matched the bleak weather one Sunday in late March as a cold wind moaned through the newly strung electric cables and icy rain spattered the pristine black asphalt roads laid in the wake of the village's liberation. Up the hill toward Beaufort Castle, Israeli engineers worked in the rain to erect more concrete
T-walls along the exposed road. Nearby, bulldozers wheeled to and fro, building a new road to bypass the bomb alley in Arnoun.

A patrol of Israeli soldiers, backed by two armored personnel carriers, inched cautiously down the road from the castle toward the center of the village, each soldier separated from his neighbor by several yards. A bomb-sniffing dog and his handler led the way while the other soldiers followed, moving with catlike stealth, rifles raised, their heads constantly turning, eyes sweeping the sides of the road. Hussein Marouni, an elderly man hunched over a brazier of burning twigs outside his stable, stiffened as the soldiers approached the swing gate just ten yards away, fearful that they might cross into “liberated” Arnoun. As the soldiers reached the gate, one of them squatted on his haunches and slowly aimed his rifle at us, blinking away the rain and squinting through his telescopic sight. After a few seconds, he rose to his feet, and without saying a word, the patrol slowly moved on until they disappeared into a dip in the road.

In early April, after a hiatus of two months, Hezbollah staged two roadside bomb ambushes along the Beaufort–Arnoun road in the space of one week. The second bomb, which killed a soldier, was placed just yards from the entrance to the castle. The next day, two more bombs were detonated against SLA militiamen patrolling near Beaufort.

Arnoun's short-lived freedom ended on the night of April 15. Israeli troops and armored vehicles moved into the village to seal it off once and for all with rows of coiled razor wire thirty yards deep. The road, which had been constructed and asphalted with such haste following Arnoun's liberation six weeks earlier, was destroyed. At least two trenches three feet deep were dug across the road, severing the newly installed water pipes.

Guarding access to Arnoun was a new outpost of bulldozed earth rammed up against the first house in the village. From behind the earth ramparts the silhouettes of Israeli soldiers were clearly visible against the rising sun the following morning. Some individuals abandoned the village, walking along a narrow dirt path through the coils of razor wire, carrying suitcases or bundles of clothing tied up with belts or cord. Among them was Saed Alawiyah, who claimed to be a hundred years
old. Bent double with age and helped along by his wife, Kemli, the frail couple struggled across the uneven path before being defeated by one of the trenches. The pathetic sight of the old man feebly trying to climb out of the trench stirred one reporter to raise his hands in the air for the benefit of the watching soldiers and walk forward to help.

In a tremulous voice, Alawiyah said, “We built Arnoun, we have always lived here, but now we are finished.”

Using a bullhorn, a soldier told the throng of reporters, in Arabic, to leave the area, and a handful of smoke grenades were hurled across the barricades to encourage our departure. But the billowing clouds of white smoke proved an attractive sight to capture on film and failed to disperse the journalists.

“Go to your cars. Get out now,” the soldier yelled. Rifle shots rang out and we ran for cover as bullets cracked past us, striking cars and flicking the dust on the road. Qassem Dergham, a sound engineer for Abu Dhabi television and a veteran of Lebanon's wars, was hit in the back—fortunately, by a plastic bullet rather than a live round, and he was not seriously hurt.

The SLA warned that anyone approaching the village from then on would be shot. But if the Israelis hoped that seizing Arnoun would ease the pressure on Beaufort, they were mistaken. Over the following month, Hezbollah concentrated its efforts on the castle, finding little difficulty in penetrating the new defenses around Arnoun to plant further roadside bombs. On May 4, three Israeli soldiers were wounded when Hezbollah mortar teams dropped rounds with impressive accuracy right on top of the Israeli fortifications inside the castle.

The highlight of Hezbollah's roadside bomb campaign came at the end of February 1999. Brigadier General Erez Gerstein, the top Israeli commander in Lebanon, had driven to Shebaa on the eastern tip of the occupation zone to pay condolences to the family of a local SLA intelligence chief murdered two months earlier in a dispute over the sharing of proceeds
in the lucrative cross-border smuggling trade into Syria, which lay a short donkey ride over the mountain passes of Mount Hermon northeast of the village. Shortly before midday, Gerstein left Shebaa in his armor-plated Mercedes, accompanied by three other civilian vehicles. Traveling with the general in his car were two soldiers and a reporter from Israel Radio.

The convoy had just passed an Indian UNIFIL position near the village of Kawkaba when the Mercedes carrying Gerstein broke an infrared beam and detonated a shaped-charge IED that blasted the vehicle off the road, sending it tumbling down the side of a valley in a ball of fire. The car was completely destroyed and all four occupants killed. A second bomb exploded twenty-five minutes later against an SLA vehicle, wounding two militiamen.

This was the second attempt by Hezbollah to kill Gerstein, and it was planned well in advance. The bombs had been planted a month earlier by a Hezbollah Special Forces team that infiltrated the zone from the north and crept through the rugged hills near Kawkaba to the stretch of road selected for the ambush. A second Hezbollah unit even slipped back into the zone after a couple of weeks to exchange the battery on the main IED for a fully charged replacement. But the batteries on three other IEDs were not replaced, an oversight that spared the Israelis further casualties in the minutes after Gerstein's Mercedes was blasted off the road.

In the days that followed, Israeli and SLA forces imposed a clampdown on neighboring villages, suspecting Hezbollah had inside assistance for the assassination. Although the culprits were never found, several Lebanese intelligence sources confirmed that the information on Gerstein's condolence trip to Shebaa was leaked to Syrian military intelligence by a network of agents under the control of Ramzi Nohra. After his expulsion from the zone in July 1998 following his release from prison in Israel, Ramzi had continued his clandestine activities from Beirut. His network covered much of the northern sector, the corridor running from his home village of Ibl es-Saqi to Jezzine at the northern tip of the zone.

Gerstein's assassination was a spectacular success for Hezbollah. He
was the most senior Israeli commander to be assassinated in Lebanon since Israel's military involvement with its northern neighbor began in the mid-1970s. A few months before his death, Gerstein had been asked by a reporter if he believed that his armored Mercedes could withstand a roadside bomb attack. “It's all a matter of luck,” Gerstein had replied.

Sheikh Nabil Qawq would later tell me that Gerstein's killing ranked alongside the 1997 Ansariyah ambush and Ahmad Qassir's suicide bombing of the Israeli headquarters in Tyre in 1982 as the top three operations carried out by Hezbollah during the years of occupation.

The loss of the IDF's top commander in Lebanon had a profound impact on Israeli public opinion. This was not a junior-ranking soldier serving in dangerous frontline positions or on ambush duty in Wadi Salouqi. Gerstein was the tough, no-nonsense combat commander who believed in the value of the “security zone” and viewed Hezbollah as “third-rate terrorists.”
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His death underlined the stark fact that no Israeli soldier in south Lebanon was immune to Hezbollah's bombs and missiles, that the Shia group seemingly could pick off whomever it wanted whenever it wanted.

“Reality has thrown us a slap in the face. Of all people, Erez was a guy who was wholeheartedly in favor of staying in Lebanon and taking a tough stance, a fellow who always belittled the Hezbollah,” said an anonymous senior Israeli army officer in an extraordinary and frank monologue published by Israel's
Haaretz
newspaper, entitled “Time to Go.”
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Ehud Barak, then the leader of the opposition Labor Party, sensed the declining public support for continued Israeli involvement in Lebanon and announced the day after Gerstein was killed that if he won the
elections that May, he would “bring the boys home” from Lebanon within a year.

While Hezbollah's roadside bombs provided the main tactical challenge to Israeli troops and SLA militiamen in the zone in the late 1990s, the Netanyahu government found itself confounded by the strategic threat posed by the Katyusha rocket.

Since the Grapes of Wrath operation, Hezbollah had further refined its Katyusha tactic. When Israel or the SLA caused an insufficient number of Lebanese civilian casualties to warrant a full-scale cross-border rocket attack, Hezbollah would send a “limited” warning by pounding IDF positions straddling the border, allowing a few stray rounds to fly over the frontier to explode harmlessly in Israel.

One August morning in 1998, two Israeli Apache helicopter gunships killed Hussam Amine, a longtime Amal member who served on Nabih Berri's bodyguard detail. Amine was driving along a lane through orange orchards near the coast south of Tyre when the helicopters struck. The first missile missed Amine's blue Mercedes and burrowed deep into the sun-softened asphalt of the road before exploding. The second hit the vehicle, knocking it off the road and blowing Amine to pieces. Thick gouts of blood pooled on the seats of the fire-blackened car. Strips of red meat hung like grotesque fruit from the branches of an orange tree as youngsters scampered through the undergrowth retrieving wreckage from the car and the scattered remains of the dead Amal man.

That evening, Hezbollah fired forty-seven Katyusha rockets into northern Israel, slightly wounding seventeen civilians. The gut instinct of the Israeli government and army was to lash back at Hezbollah to avenge the rocket attack as well as the deaths of three Israeli soldiers in separate attacks that week. But the Israeli government knew that a retaliation in Lebanon risked triggering more Katyusha rocket salvos. The dilemma facing the Israelis was that Hezbollah's rocket barrage had
nothing to do with Amine's death. While the Apache helicopters were firing missiles at Amine's car, Hezbollah guerrillas farther north killed an SLA militiaman in the Jezzine district. The SLA retaliated by shelling Mashghara, a mixed Christian and Shia village adjacent to the Jezzine enclave, wounding six civilians, setting a car on fire, and damaging houses. Hezbollah had cautioned just two days earlier that the rate of Lebanese civilian casualties was increasing and that it could force a Katyusha rocket response against Israel. Hezbollah fulfilled its warning and rocketed Israel, and the Israeli government, tacitly acknowledging that Hezbollah had played within the rules of the game, was stuck for a counterresponse.

“In the past, anyone who launched rockets into Israel could count on a counterstrike by the Israel Defense Forces; nowadays, Hezbollah has the last word,” wrote Zvi Barel, an Israeli commentator in
Haaretz
. “The primitive Katyusha rocket has become, in the Israeli-Lebanese arena, a strategic weapon in Lebanese hands.”

The Netanyahu government found itself stuck, once again, for a retaliatory option when Hezbollah fired a volley of rockets into Israel four months later in response to the deaths of seven members of a family during an Israeli air strike against a Hezbollah radio antenna in the Bekaa Valley. Israel was at fault for the civilian deaths, and Hezbollah had retaliated according to the unwritten rules of the game.

Netanyahu, who had been criticized for not retaliating for the Katyusha attack the previous August, told reporters during a tour of rocket damage in Kiryat Shemona, “This time we will respond.” But he didn't.

Two months later, on February 28, 1999, hours after General Gerstein was killed, Netanyahu, Major General Shaul Mofaz, the IDF chief of staff, and Moshe Arens, the defense minister, stood before the television cameras and announced the launch of a new offensive against Hezbollah. The Israelis were understandably incensed over Gerstein's assassination as well as the deaths five days earlier of three officers, including
a major, when a unit from the Paratroop Reconnaissance Battalion stumbled into a Hezbollah ambush. But the roadside bomb attack against Gerstein and the ambush against the paratroops fell within the April Understanding and could not be used to justify a punishing counterstrike. So the Israeli government seized upon a pair of Katyusha rockets fired across the border hours before Gerstein was killed as the excuse for launching the offensive, even though Hezbollah had denied firing any rockets and UNIFIL said it had seen nothing. As Israeli jets flew up the Bekaa Valley to bomb a building near Baalbek as well as other targets along the edges of the zone, a stern-faced Mofaz told reporters assembled in the ministry of defense, “The offensive action will continue also on the ground, from the air and the sea. The army will fight Hezbollah.”