Looking every bit the fugitive, I went to the top of the hill next to the Ramallah Library, from which I could see the southeast side of town where my father was. I figured I would be safe there, and I could run to the hotel as soon as I heard the tanks.
Around midnight, hundreds of Merkavas roared into the city. I hadn’t expected them to invade from every direction at once—or to be moving so quickly. Some of the streets were so narrow that the tank drivers had no choice but to climb over the tops of the cars. Other streets were wide enough, but the soldiers seemed to enjoy the screech of grating metal under their treads. Streets in the refugee camps were little more than paths between cinder-block houses that the tanks ground into gravel.
“Turn off your radio!” I told my father. “Stay down! Keep your head down!”
I had parked my father’s Audi at the curb. And I watched in horror as a tank tread crushed it to pulp. It wasn’t supposed to be there. I didn’t know what to do. I certainly couldn’t call Loai and ask him to stop the operation just because I had decided to play Rambo.
I ran toward the center of the city and ducked into an underground parking garage, just a few yards from an oncoming tank. No troops were on the ground yet; they were waiting for the Merkavas to secure the area. Suddenly, I had a terrifying realization. A number of Palestinian resistance factions had offices in the building directly above my head. I had taken refuge in a key target.
Tanks have no discernment. They can’t tell the difference between Shin Bet collaborators and terrorists, Christians and Muslims, armed fighters and unarmed civilians. And the kids inside those machines were just as scared as I was. All around me, guys who looked just like me fired AK-47s at the tanks.
Huge pieces of the buildings around us began to collapse into smoking heaps. Every cannon thump was a punch in the gut. Automatic weapons chattered and echoed off every wall. Another explosion. Blinding dust clouds. Flying chips and chunks of stone and metal.
I had to get out of there. But how?
Suddenly, a group of Fatah fighters ran into the garage and crouched around me. This wasn’t good. What if the soldiers came now? The feda’iyeen would open up on them. Would I shoot too? If so, at whom? If I didn’t shoot, they would kill me anyway. But I couldn’t kill anyone. At one time I might have been able to, but not anymore.
More fighters came, calling to others as they ran. Suddenly, everything seemed to stop. Nobody breathed.
IDF soldiers made their way cautiously into the garage. Closer. Whatever was going to happen would cut loose in seconds. Their torches searched for the whites of eyes or a reflection from a weapon. They listened. And we watched. Sweaty index fingers on both sides were poised on triggers.
Then the Red Sea parted.
Maybe they were afraid to go any deeper into the black, humid parking garage, or maybe they simply yearned for the familiar companionship of a tank. For whatever reason, the soldiers stopped, turned, and just walked out.
Once they were clear, I made my way upstairs and found a room where I could call Loai.
“Could you ask the IDF to back off a couple of blocks so I can get back to my hotel?”
“What! Where are you? Why aren’t you in the hotel?”
“I’m doing my job.”
“You’re nuts!”
There was an uncomfortable silence.
“Okay, we’ll see what we can do.”
It took a couple of hours to move the tanks and troops, who must have wondered why they had been pulled back. Once they moved, I nearly broke my leg jumping from one rooftop to another to return to my room. I shut the door, stripped, and stuffed my terrorist outfit and weapon into the air-conditioning duct.
Meanwhile, the house where my father was hiding was right in the center of the storm. The IDF searched inside every house around him, behind every building, and under every rock. But they had orders not to enter that particular house.
Inside, my father read his Qur’an and prayed. The owner of the house read the Qur’an and prayed. His wife read the Qur’an and prayed. Then, for no apparent reason, the troops left and began searching another area.
“You will not believe the miracle, Mosab!” my father said into my handset later. “It was unbelievable! They came. They searched every house around us, the entire neighborhood—except where we were. Allah be praised!”
There had been nothing like Operation Defensive Shield since the Six-Day War. And this was only the beginning. Ramallah was the spearhead of the operation. Bethlehem, Jenin, and Nablus followed. While I had been running around dodging Israeli troops, the IDF had surrounded Yasser Arafat’s compound. Everything was locked down. Strict curfews were imposed.
On April 2, tanks and armored personnel carriers surrounded the Preventive Security Compound near our house in Betunia. Helicopter gunships chugged overhead. We knew the PA was hiding at least fifty wanted men at the compound, and the Shin Bet was frustrated because it was coming up empty-handed everywhere else.
The compound included four buildings, in addition to the four-story office building that housed Colonel Jibril Rajoub[11] and other security officials. The entire facility had been designed, built, and equipped by the CIA. The police were trained and armed by the CIA. The CIA even had offices there. Hundreds of heavily armed police were inside, along with a large number of prisoners, including Bilal Barghouti and others on Israel’s hit list. The Shin Bet and IDF were in a no-nonsense mood. Loudspeakers announced that the army would blow up Building One in five minutes and ordered everybody out.
Exactly five minutes later,
“Take off your clothes!” came the demand over the loudspeakers. The Israelis took no chances that someone might still be armed or packed with explosives. Hundreds of men stripped naked. They were given jumpsuits, loaded onto buses, and taken to nearby Ofer Military Base—where the Shin Bet discovered its mistake.
Of course there were too many people to lock up, but the Israelis wanted only the fugitives anyway. They had planned to sift through the detainees and release all but those on its list of suspects. The problem was that everybody had left their clothes—with their ID cards—back at the compound. How would the security forces distinguish between wanted men and police?
Ofer Dekel, Loai’s boss’s boss, was in charge. He called Jibril Rajoub, who had been away from the compound at the time of the attack. Dekel gave Rajoub a special permit so he could pass safely through hundreds of tanks and thousands of soldiers. When he arrived, Dekel asked Rajoub if he would mind pointing out which men worked for him and which were fugitives. Rajoub said he would be happy to. Quickly, Rajoub identified police as fugitives and fugitives as police, and the Shin Bet released all the wanted men.
“Why did you do that to me?” Dekel asked, after he figured out what had happened.
“You just blew up my offices and my compound,” Rajoub calmly explained in what amounted to a Palestinian version of “Duh.” Dekel also seemed to have forgotten that his PA pal had been wounded a year earlier when IDF tanks and helicopters leveled his home, making him even less inclined to do favors for the Israelis.
The Shin Bet was deeply embarrassed. The only thing they could do in retaliation was release an official account that branded Rajoub as a traitor for turning over the wanted men to Israel in a deal brokered by the CIA. As a result, Rajoub lost his power and ended up as head of the Palestinian Soccer Association.
This was clearly a debacle.
Over the next three weeks, the Israelis did lift the curfew from time to time, and during a break on April 15, I was able to bring some food and other necessities to my father. He told me he didn’t feel safe in that house and wanted to move. I called one of the Hamas leaders and asked if he knew of any place where Hassan Yousef could be protected. He told me to take my father to the location where Sheikh Jamal al-Taweel, another high-profile Hamas fugitive, was hiding.
