“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Why would Arafat’s guards be living outside the compound? You got something wrong.”
“I got nothing wrong!” I snapped. I knew this wasn’t adding up, and I was frustrated by the fact that although I knew what I had seen, I couldn’t explain it. Now this guy was telling me that I hadn’t seen it.
“The whole situation is wrong,” I told him. “I don’t care if this makes sense to you or not. I saw what I saw.”
He was indignant that I talked to him like that and stormed out of the meeting. Loai encouraged me to calm down and to go back over all the details one more time. Apparently, the Chevy didn’t fit the information they had about the Brigades. It was a stolen Israeli car, which was what PA guys tended to drive, but we couldn’t figure out how it connected them with the new faction.
“Are you sure it was a green Chevy?” he asked. “You didn’t see a BMW?”
I was sure it was a green Chevy, but I went back to the apartment anyway. There was the Chevy, parked in the same spot. Beside the apartment, however, I saw another car covered by a white sheet. I carefully crept to the side of the building and lifted the back corner of the sheet. Underneath was a 1982 silver BMW.
“Okay, we got ’em!” Loai yelled back into my cell phone when I called to tell him what I had found.
“What are you talking about?”
“Arafat’s guards!”
“What do you mean? I thought my information was all wrong,” I said with some sarcasm.
“No, you were absolutely right. That BMW has been used in every shooting in the West Bank for the past couple of months.”
He went on to explain that this information was a real breakthrough because it was the first proof that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades was none other than Yasser Arafat’s own guards—funded directly by him with taxpayer money from America and international donors. Discovering this link was a huge step toward being able to put a stop to the horrific string of bombings that was killing innocent civilians. The evidence I gave to the Shin Bet would later be used against Arafat before the UN Security Council.[6] Now, all we had to do was catch the members of this new cell—cut off the head of the snake, as the Israelis liked to say.
We learned that the most dangerous members were Ahmad Ghandour, a leader of the Brigades, and Muhaned Abu Halawa, one of his lieutenants. They had already killed a dozen people. Putting these guys out of business didn’t appear to be too difficult a task. We knew who they were and where they lived. And, crucially, they didn’t know that we knew.
The IDF launched an unmanned drone to circle the apartment complex and gather intelligence. Two days later, the Brigades made another attack inside Israel, and the Israelis wanted to hit back. The 120 mm cannon of a sixty-five-ton Israeli Merkava battle tank fired twenty shells into the Brigades’ building. Unfortunately, no one had bothered to check the surveillance drone to see if the guys were there. They weren’t.
Even worse, now they knew that we were on to them. Not surprisingly, they took refuge in Yasser Arafat’s compound. We knew they were there, but at that time it was politically impossible to go in and get them. Now their attacks became more frequent and aggressive.
Because he was a leader, Ahmad Ghandour was at the top of the wanted list. After he moved inside the compound, we figured we would never get him. And as it turned out, we didn’t. He got himself.
Walking down the street one day, close to the old cemetery in Al-Bireh, I encountered a military funeral.
“Who died?” I asked out of curiosity.
“Somebody from the north,” a man said. “I doubt you know him.”
“What’s his name?”
“His name is Ahmad Ghandour.”
I tried to control my excitement and asked casually, “What happened to him? I think I’ve heard that name before.”
“He didn’t know his gun was loaded, and he shot himself in the head. They say his brain stuck to the ceiling.”
I called Loai.
“Say good-bye to Ahmad Ghandour, because Ahmad Ghandour is dead.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Did you give me a gun? No, I didn’t kill him. He shot himself. The guy is gone.”
Loai couldn’t believe it.
“The man is dead. I’m at his funeral.”
Throughout the first years of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, I accompanied my father everywhere he went. As his eldest son, I was his protege, his bodyguard, his confidant, his student, and his friend. And he was my everything —my example of what it meant to be a man. Though our ideologies were clearly no longer the same, I knew that his heart was right and his motives were pure. His love for Muslim people and his devotion to Allah never waned. He ached for peace among his people, and he had spent his entire life working toward that goal.
This second uprising was mostly a West Bank event. Gaza had a few demonstrations, and the death of the young Mohammed al-Dura had touched the flame to the tinder. But it was Hamas that fanned that fire into an inferno in the West Bank.
In every village, town, and city, angry crowds clashed with Israeli soldiers. Every checkpoint became a bloody battlefield. You could scarcely find an individual who had not buried dear friends or family members in recent days.
Meanwhile, the leaders of all the Palestinian factions—top-level, high-profile men—met daily with Yasser Arafat to coordinate their strategies. My father represented Hamas, which had again become the largest and most important organization. He, Marwan Barghouti, and Arafat also met weekly, apart from the others. On several occasions, I was able to accompany my father to those private meetings.
I despised Arafat and what he was doing to the people I loved. But given my role as a mole for the Shin Bet, it clearly wasn’t prudent for me to show my feelings. Still, on one occasion, after Arafat kissed me, I instinctively wiped my cheek. He noticed and was clearly humiliated. My father was embarrassed. And that was the last time my father took me along.
The intifada leaders invariably arrived for those daily meetings in their seventy-thousand-dollar foreign cars, accompanied by other cars filled with bodyguards. But my father always drove in his dark blue 1987 Audi. No bodyguard, just me.
These meetings were the engine that made the intifada run. Although I now had to sit outside the meeting room, I still knew every detail that went on inside because my father took notes. I had access to those notes and made copies. There was never any supersensitive information in the notes—like the who, where, and when of a military operation. Rather, the leaders always spoke in general terms that revealed patterns and direction, such as focusing an attack inside Israel or targeting settlers or checkpoints.
The meeting notes did, however, include dates for demonstrations. If my father said Hamas would have a demonstration tomorrow at one o’clock in the center of Ramallah, runners would quickly be sent to the mosques, refugee camps, and schools to inform all the Hamas members to be there at one o’clock. Israeli soldiers showed up too. As a result, Muslims, refugees, and, all too often, schoolchildren were killed.
The fact is, Hamas had been all but dead before the Second Intifada. My father should have left it alone. Every day, the people of the Arab nations saw his face and heard his voice on Al-Jazeera TV. He was now the visible leader of the intifada. That made him amazingly popular and important throughout the Muslim world, but it also made him the consummate bad guy as far as Israel was concerned.
At the end of the day, however, Hassan Yousef was not puffed up. He just felt humbly content that he had done the will of Allah.
Reading my father’s meeting notes one morning, I saw that a demonstration had been scheduled. The next day, I walked behind him at the head of the deafening mob to an Israeli checkpoint. Two hundred yards before we reached the checkpoint, the leaders peeled off and moved to the safety of a hilltop. Everybody else—the young men and children from the schools—surged forward and began throwing stones at the heavily armed soldiers, who responded by firing into the crowd.
In these situations, even rubber-coated bullets could be deadly. Children were particularly vulnerable. This ammunition was easily lethal when fired at a range closer than the minimum forty meters prescribed by IDF
