moments. As usual, they would have to pay the price for everything my father and I did.
I looked at my mother’s beautiful garden. She had gathered flowers from all over, taking cuttings from friends and family whenever she could. She cared for her flowers like they were her children.
“How many flowers do we need?” I sometimes teased her.
“Just a few more” was always the reply.
I recalled the time she pointed to one and said, “This plant is older than you. When you were a child, you broke its pot, but I saved it and it’s still alive.”
Would it still be alive a few minutes from now after arriving troops crushed it under their feet?
My cell phone rang.
Blood rushed to my head. My heart pounded. I started my engine and sped toward the center of town where I had established a new secret location. I was no longer pretending to be a fugitive. Soldiers who would rather kill me than arrest me were searching for me at that very moment. One minute after my departure, ten civilian cars with Palestinian plates slammed on their brakes. Israeli special forces surrounded the house, automatic weapons covering every door and window. The neighborhood was full of children, including my brother Naser. They stopped their soccer game and scattered, terrified.
As soon as the troops were in position, more than twenty tanks thundered in. Now the whole city knew something was going on. I could hear the massive diesel engines from my hideout. Hundreds of armed Palestinian militants rushed to my father’s house and surrounded the IDF. But they couldn’t shoot because children were still running for cover and because my family was inside.
With the arrival of the feda’iyeen, the helicopters were called in.
I suddenly wondered if I had been wrong to spare the suicide bombers. If I had just let the IDF drop a bomb on them, my family and our neighborhood would not be at risk now. If one of my siblings died in this chaos, I would never forgive myself.
To make certain our elaborate production became a global news event, I had tipped off Al-Jazeera that there was going to be an attack on the home of Sheikh Hassan Yousef. They all thought the Israelis had finally gotten my father, and they wanted to broadcast his arrest live. I imagined what their reaction would be when the loudspeakers started to crackle and the soldiers demanded that his oldest son, Mosab, come out with his hands up. As soon as I got to my apartment, I flipped on the TV and watched the drama along with the rest of the Arab world.
The army evacuated my family and questioned them. My mother told them that I had left one minute before they arrived. Of course, they didn’t believe her. They believed the Shin Bet, the ones who had staged the entire production and the only people besides myself who knew that the game had begun. When I didn’t surrender, they threatened to start shooting.
For a tense ten minutes, everyone waited to see whether I would come out and, if I did, whether I would emerge shooting or with my hands in the air. Then time was up. They opened fire, and more than two hundred bullets riddled my second-floor bedroom (and are still in the walls today). There was no more talking. They had obviously decided to kill me.
Suddenly, the shooting stopped. Moments later, a missile whistled through the air and blew up half our house. Soldiers rushed inside. I knew they were searching every room. No corpse and no hiding fugitive.
The IDF was embarrassed and enraged that I had slipped from their grasp. If they caught me now, Loai warned over the phone, they would shoot me on sight. For us, however, the operation was a success. No one had been hurt, and I had advanced to the most-wanted list. The whole city was talking about me. Overnight, I had become a dangerous terrorist.
For the next few months, I had three priorities: stay out of the army’s way, protect my dad, and continue to gather intelligence. In that order.
Chapter Twenty-Two
DEFENSIVE SHIELD
Spring 2002
The escalation in violence was dizzying.
Israelis were shot and stabbed and blown up. Palestinians were assassinated. Round and round it went, faster and faster. The international community tried in vain to pressure Israel.
“End the illegal occupation…. Stop the bombing of civilian areas, the assassinations, the unnecessary use of lethal force, the demolitions and the daily humiliation of ordinary Palestinians,” demanded UN secretary-general Kofi Annan in March 2002.[9]
On the same day that we had arrested the four suicide bombers I had protected from assassination, European Union leaders called on both Israel and the Palestinians to rein in the violence. “There is no military solution to this conflict,” they said.[10]
In 2002, Passover fell on March 27. In a dining room on the ground floor of the Park Hotel in Netanya, 250 guests had gathered for the traditional Seder meal.
A twenty-five-year-old Hamas operative named Abdel-Basset Odeh walked past the front security guard, past the registration desk in the lobby, and into the packed hall. Then he reached into his jacket.
The explosion killed 30 people and wounded about 140 others. Some were Holocaust survivors. Hamas claimed responsibility, saying that the purpose of the attack was to derail the Arab Summit being held in Beirut. Nevertheless, the next day, the Saudi-led Arab League announced that it had voted unanimously to recognize the State of Israel and normalize relations, as long as Israel agreed to withdraw to the 1967 boundaries, resolve the refugee problem, and establish an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. Receiving these concessions from Israel would have been a huge victory for our people if Hamas wasn’t still committed to its all-or- nothing idealism.
Recognizing this, Israel was planning its own extreme solution.
Two weeks earlier, officials had decided to test the waters for a major incursion into the Palestinian territories by invading the twin cities of Ramallah and Al-Bireh. Military analysts warned of high Israeli casualties. They needn’t have worried.
The IDF killed five Palestinians, imposed curfews, and occupied a few buildings. Huge D9 armored bulldozers also demolished several homes in Al-Amari refugee camp, including that of Wafa Idris, the first female suicide bomber, who had killed an eighty-one-year-old Israeli man and injured a hundred others outside a shoe store in Jerusalem back on January 27.
After the Park Hotel outrage, however, the test incursion became irrelevant. The Israeli cabinet gave the green light to launch an unprecedented operation, code-named Defensive Shield.
My phone rang. It was Loai.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“The whole IDF is gathering,” Loai said. “Tonight, we will have Saleh and every other fugitive in custody.”
“What do you mean?”
“We are going to reoccupy the entire West Bank and search every house and office building, however long it takes. Stay put. I’ll keep in touch.”
Rumors flew throughout the West Bank. The Palestinian leadership knew something was up but had no idea what. People left work, clinics, and classrooms and went home to sit by their television sets, waiting for news. I had moved my father to a house owned by a couple of American citizens, and the Shin Bet assured me he would be safe there.
On March 29, I checked into the City Inn Hotel on Nablus Road in Al-Bireh, where the BBC, CNN, and the rest of the international media were housed. My father and I kept in touch with two-way radios.
The Shin Bet expected me to be at my hotel, eating chips and watching TV. But I didn’t want to miss anything so important. I wanted to be on top of everything, so I slung my M16 over my shoulder and headed out.
