Warriors of God (56 page)

It was a profoundly unsettling period for Hezbollah, and especially for Syria's staunch allies in Lebanon, who kept low profiles in the aftermath of the Beirut Spring and the onset of a UN investigation into Hariri's murder. But in the south, the Islamic Resistance diligently pursued its war preparations irrespective of the seismic political shift in Beirut.

Hezbollah and Israel had conducted a prisoner swap in January 2004 in which Elhanan Tannenbaum, the Israeli reservist colonel and would-be drug smuggler, along with the bodies of the three soldiers abducted from the Shebaa Farms in October 2000, were exchanged for twenty-three Lebanese detainees, four hundred Palestinian prisoners, and twelve other Arabs. Among the detainees were Mustafa Dirani and Sheikh Abdel-Karim Obeid. Israel also agreed to repatriate the bodies of fifty-nine Lebanese resistance fighters, provide information on twenty-four Lebanese who went missing during Israel's 1982 invasion, and hand over maps of land mines planted in south Lebanon during the years of occupation.

The swap deal included a follow-up component in which Hezbollah promised to try to find definitive proof of the whereabouts of Ron Arad, the missing Israeli aviator. In exchange for concrete information, Israel would release the last Lebanese detainees, including Samir Kuntar, a Druze who was serving a 542-year jail sentence for killing an Israeli policeman and three members of a family during a commando raid on northern Israel in 1979.

Whether Hezbollah knows what happened to Arad or genuinely lost track of him in 1988 remains unclear. By April 2005, fifteen months after the prisoner exchange, no progress had been made in concluding the second part of the deal. Nasrallah then declared that it was unacceptable for Kuntar and the other Lebanese detainees to remain in jail just because Hezbollah had so far been unable to discover Arad's whereabouts. “If we fail in the negotiations, the result of which, no matter what, will be known very soon … we will have only one option,” he said, referring to kidnapping more Israeli soldiers.

Hezbollah exercised that option seven months later. In the early afternoon of November 21, the Islamic Resistance launched a coordinated multipronged assault against Israeli positions in Ghajar village and the adjacent Shebaa Farms in what was the largest and most complex operation since the October 2000 abduction of the three soldiers. Under cover of a heavy mortar and rocket barrage against Israeli outposts, some twenty members of Hezbollah's Special Forces unit traveling in jeeps, all-terrain vehicles, and a motorcycle penetrated the Israel-controlled southern neighborhood of Ghajar. But the Israelis had received intelligence of an impending kidnapping operation and had redeployed the troops in Ghajar. An Israeli corporal armed with a sniper's rifle, who was fortuitously placed along the route used by the Hezbollah men to infiltrate the village, shot and killed four of the attackers, foiling the raid. The operation was notable for being the first time that Hezbollah employed the tandem warhead RPG-29, the more modern version of the ubiquitous RPG-7, which it fired in large numbers at Merkava tanks and armored personnel carriers at a compound just east of Ghajar. One Merkava was struck seven times by antitank missiles and RPGs, but the crew survived unscathed. After the assault team pulled out of Ghajar, Israeli troops entered the northern third of the village and blew up the old bomb shelter that Hezbollah had used as a command post. Israeli Air Force jets bombed around thirteen Hezbollah positions in the southern border district, the largest air strikes since May 2000.

A few months earlier, Major General Alain Pellegrini, a short, moon-faced French officer who commanded UNIFIL, had attended a meeting in Jerusalem with senior Israeli military staff at which the subject of a possible Hezbollah kidnapping along the Blue Line was brought up. Pellegrini was told that if there was another abduction, Israel would set “Beirut on fire.” “This was a real red line for Israel,” Pellegrini told me.

The UNIFIL commander passed the warning on to the Lebanese government, but he was unaware whether it reached Hezbollah. If it had, it is unlikely that Hezbollah would have paid much attention. Hezbollah believed that the “balance of terror” along the Blue Line
would continue to hold even if more Israeli soldiers were abducted. For all the headaches Hezbollah caused the Israeli government, there was little appetite in Israel for a war. In the aftermath of the raid on Ghajar, Major General Aharam Zeevi-Farkash, the IDF military intelligence chief, met with Ariel Sharon and told the premier that Nasrallah was trying to drag Israel into a war. “You worry too much,” Sharon replied to Farkash. “I know what they are trying to do.”

On January 4, 2006, Sharon suffered a stroke and fell into a coma. He was replaced by his deputy, Ehud Olmert, who went on to narrowly win a general election two months later. The key defense portfolio was conferred upon Amir Peretz, a former trade union leader who, like Olmert, a former mayor of Jerusalem, had no military background.

All the pieces were in place for a disaster. A hubristic Hezbollah was determined to kidnap more Israeli soldiers, confident in its powers of deterrence against an Israel that time and time again since 2000 had demonstrated no appetite for a major confrontation. And in Israel there was a raw, untested government whose top security ministers lacked any military experience. Adding to the brew was Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the IDF chief of staff since 2005. A former head of the Israeli Air Force, Halutz strongly opposed the IDF withdrawal from Lebanon, supported the continued overflights in Lebanese airspace despite international protestations, and, according to Timur Goksel, the veteran UNIFIL official, believed that “every problem can be solved with a suitable application of firepower from his F-16s or Apache assault helicopters.”
⁷

On the morning of May 26, Mohammed and Nidal Majzoub, two brothers who were top officials in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, died when their booby-trapped car blew up on a busy street in Sidon. Mohammed Majzoub was PIJ's liaison officer with Hezbollah, and until recently he and his brother had lived under Hezbollah's protection in its “security quarter” in the southern suburbs of Beirut. According to a senior Hezbollah official, their fate was sealed when their wives grew bored
with being cloistered in the “security quarter” and badgered their husbands into moving to Sidon, where Hezbollah could not provide the same level of security.

In keeping with the tit-for-tat brinkmanship along the Blue Line, a retaliation was expected for the deaths of the Majzoub brothers. It came two days later, when eight Katyusha rockets were fired from close to the border fence south of the village of Aittaroun in the western sector. The surprising choice of target was the Israeli air control base on Mount Meron, six miles south of the border. Seven of the eight Katyushas struck the facility in what was at the time the deepest penetration into Israel by Hezbollah's rockets. Hezbollah denied responsibility, but no other group in Lebanon had the capacity for such accurate rocket fire or the tactical bravado in selecting such a pertinent target.

The Israelis initially preferred to blame the PFLP-GC, the usual address for messages involving rockets crossing the border. Israeli jets bombed PFLP-GC bases in the Bekaa Valley and south of Beirut. But after an unidentified gunman shot and wounded an Israeli soldier along the border hours later, the jets returned to Lebanese skies and staged more than sixty air strikes against Hezbollah positions in the border district. Hezbollah responded by mortaring Israeli border outposts, and by midafternoon, the biggest confrontation in five years was under way all along the Blue Line. The Israelis took advantage of the fighting to destroy most of Hezbollah's observation posts along the border. Tanks blasted lookout towers and smashed walls and fortifications following what was clearly a pre-prepared plan. Only one Hezbollah fighter was killed in the clashes, however; all Hezbollah men had vacated the visible positions before the fighting began, in accordance with normal procedure.

UNIFIL helped broker a cease-fire in the late afternoon, and both sides retired to assess the outcome. The following day, I drove along a narrow lane that wound up the side of a steep hill overlooking the border village of Kfar Kila. Hezbollah had a position on the summit of the hill that had apparently been heavily damaged by Israeli air strikes during the fighting the previous day. I was not expecting to reach the top of the hill, but it was sometimes worth blithely driving into Hezbollah's
security pockets to see what would happen. A steel chain suspended between two concrete blocks marked the end of the road for me. A Hezbollah man, dressed in a green camouflage uniform and floppy bush hat and with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder, stepped into the center of the road and raised his hand.

Explaining that I was a journalist and flashing my Lebanese government-issued press card, I told him I had heard there had been an air raid on the hill and I was here to have a look. The fighter spoke into his walkie-talkie and instructed me to switch off the car engine and wait, as this would take some time, an hour, perhaps longer. The warm spring breeze carried the scent of wild thyme and ruffled the fluffy heads of purple thistles lining the road.

Initially taciturn, the Hezbollah fighter grew friendlier as the minutes passed. He had joined the resistance ten years earlier and fought during the occupation and afterward in the Shebaa Farms. He denied that the Israelis had bombed the hilltop outpost the previous day, saying that the bulldozer grinding to and fro, out of sight but clearly audible to both of us, was simply destroying an old Israeli outpost. “The Israelis started the fighting by killing the two Islamic Jihad men in Sidon,” he said. “The Israelis are always making wars against their neighbors—Lebanon, the Palestinians, Syria, Jordan, Egypt. When the Israelis occupied Lebanon it was natural for me to join the resistance and fight. Now we are defending Lebanon.”

So when would the next battle with the Israelis be?

The fighter smiled and said, “It's up to God.”

A black Range Rover without license plates—the mark of a Hezbollah security vehicle—pulled up beside us. A small, thin man with a wispy beard and dressed in civilian clothes and a baseball cap scrutinized my press card. He pulled from his pocket a small digital camera and sheepishly asked me to stand beside my car.
Does one give a friendly smile or stare with a scowl for a Hezbollah mug shot?
, I thought, as the photographer took the picture. Then, looking even more embarrassed and apologizing profusely, he asked me to turn sideways so that he could snap a shot of my profile. I was released shortly afterward, with more apologies for having been detained for so long.

The following week, I met with Sheikh Nabil Qawq in Hezbollah's press office in the southern suburbs of Beirut. The tall white-turbaned cleric strode into the room and we shook hands and greeted each other. He sat down in an armchair and leaned forward.

“I liked your pictures,” he said with an amused smile.

Qawq was Hezbollah's top man in southern Lebanon, and it was natural that the mug shots of a foreign snooper would have been passed on to him. I could imagine him shaking his head in exasperation as he flicked through the photos.
Blanford up to mischief again
.

He was in good spirits, though, and a lively conversation ensued. We discussed the latest round of fighting. The Israelis had struck a self-congratulatory tone, believing that the swift use of heavy firepower against the Hezbollah positions had given the party a bloody nose.

“We hope the message from our response was understood correctly by the other side,” said Brigadier General Gal Hirsch, commander of the IDF's Galilee Division. “If the message was not internalized and violence recurs, we will know how to retaliate even stronger.”
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Amos Harel, the defense correspondent of Israel's
Haaretz
newspaper, wrote that Nasrallah had fallen into an “ambush” by firing rockets at the Mount Meron air control base, thus giving Israel an excuse to smash its military infrastructure along the border. “When a guerrilla organization builds permanent positions, it provides its enemy with a range of easy targets,” he wrote.

Yet unknown to everyone outside the circles of the Islamic Resistance was the fact that Hezbollah's real positions—the steel-lined tunnels, bunkers, and camouflaged rocket-firing positions buried deep in the sides of south Lebanon's hills—remained undiscovered and untouched. No wonder Qawq was dismissive of the Israeli claims.

“We were not surprised by the Israeli escalation,” he said. “We knew it was likely … so we took precautions. Our positions were all empty.

These positions are not real positions anyway.… [The Israelis] have an inferiority complex. They hit empty positions and then talk about an imaginary success.”

Israel had ended the latest bout with restored confidence in its ability to confront Hezbollah and deal the organization a blow of sufficient
strength for Hezbollah's leadership to think twice before embarking on any more escapades along the border. And Hezbollah had emerged unimpressed with Israel's boasts of military strength, remaining convinced that its own powers of deterrence still held. Both sides, blinded by hubris, had taken another step closer to the brink of disaster.

“We are confident enough in our capabilities to make any Israeli adventure very expensive, so high that they cannot tolerate the burden,” Qawq said. “In fact they will have more damage than Lebanon.”

In less than one month, that boast would be put to the test.

TEN