covert patrols up close to the dividing line and throughout the Old City. And now his colleagues in the three armed battalions of the Golani Brigade advanced upon his territory.
By 4:30 they were inside the perimeter. The Barak group deployed immediately from Jabal Abu Sneina, placing its cordon just south of the Old City in a Une running hard down the dividing frontier between H-l and H-2. The Gideons moved west to the Bir Al-Saba Road, and then north up to the Hebron bypass. The Third Battalion deployed along the whole span of the north end of the town, with the Egoz Unit moving south to occupy the inner city dividing line, then west along Al-Qarantina Street.
In the Brigade Headquarters west of the city, the troops constructed a wire-rimmed holding area for arrested Palestinians. There was also a tented section both for conducting the interrogation of prisoners and for first aid and help for the wounded.
The Israeli Tank Squadron now deployed to troop positions astride the Hebron bypass, covering the western and northern approaches to the city. A separate unit guarded the southern approaches.
At 5:30, with the city and its perimeters secure, the specialist teams were ready to go.
In Brigade Headquarters, Major Kerman watched carefully, and at first light on that sultry Friday morning, the sky blazing scarlet along the eastern horizon, the Golani Commanding Officer let loose the dogs of war into the sleeping city of Hebron.
They started in the north, the specialist Israeli search teams moving through the area, entering warehouses, workshops, and some residences where known extremists resided. There were very few arrests, and there was little interference from local people. The cordon held, and no outsiders were permitted into the area by the heavily armed paratroopers who stood menacingly in the rear.
The Ras al Jura section, a 100 percent enclave of Palestinian streets, was dealt with in less than two hours. A half dozen Arabs were arrested and just a handful of weapons was found. From there the search teams began moving south, working swiftly down either side of the Jerusalem Road, banging on doors, forcing locks, kicking their way into secure premises, setting off the occasional alarm, and then silencing it with a burst of gunfire.
Steadily they elbowed their way toward the center of town, where there were increasingly shuttered stores, and the troops did not hesitate to smash their way inside. There was no question of looting, just searching, and the Israelis maintained the iron discipline, upon which the SAS Major, Ray Kerman, had insisted in their training.
Behind them everything was quiet, since no Arab, terrorist, craftsman, or goatherd wanted to follow in the wake of the legendary tough Israeli Paratroopers. But up front, by half past nine, unrest was beginning to develop. Mobs of Arab youths were gathering east of the Jerusalem Road, between the wide commercial street and the dividing line between the zones of H-l and H-2.
They were starting to position themselves upstream of the search parties in the Haarat Al-Sheik area, right on the edge of the Old City. They were yelling and taunting the armed troops, and at 9:40, the first stones were thrown, initially just a few stray missiles. But by ten the stones were streaming through the air in a lethal hail of resentment. As the minutes wore on, the stones were growing larger, fist-sized rocks, mingled with slabs of concrete picked up from the ruins of buildings.
The gangs of youths were now combining into a full-scale mob, bent on humiliating the Israeli troops. They had of course no conception of the strength and depth of the IDF troops, and they ran forward hurling rocks and screaming abuse.
The Paratroopers immediately raced forward and began firing rubber bullets into the crowd, which had now swung right to face the oncoming Israeli battalion. The Paratroopers instantly raised the stakes, hurling a volley of CS gas grenades, which reduced the front line of the rock throwers to a retreating, eye-streaming confusion. But it increased the tension, as others ran forward to replace their comrades.
Again and again, the Paratroopers fired rubber bullets into the crowd. And now there were adults joining the youths, the entire scenario becoming more frenzied and vociferous by the minute. Then, suddenly, the rocks were accompanied by Molotov cocktails, which landed right at the feet of the Israelis, and blasted fire, straight at them. But through it all, the search teams kept going, beating down doors, demanding access, ransacking small businesses.
They were covered by the fire and fearsome reputation of their Paratroopers, but the conflict was now beginning to look serious. At 10:15 the troops fired three more volleys of rubber bullets, and several Arab youths, hurling rocks in the middle of the melee, hit the ground. Their colleagues, not knowing whether they were dead or just stunned, thronged forward to pick them up. The Paratroopers instantly unleashed CS gas grenades straight into the middle of the Arab rescue parties.
There was a brief pause, but in that time, the Israel searchers started to swarm through an old workshop in a notorious area just to the north of the crossroads at Bab Al-Zawiye. Moments went by, while the Palestinian mob was in temporary disarray, and then the Israelis came bursting out of the workshop calling up transport to confiscate one of the biggest caches of weapons and bomb-making materials they had ever seen, all hidden in the workshop and in a neighboring shed.
As a dozen Arabs trudged out with their hands high, folded across their heads, a group of Israeli Paratroopers rushed forward to carry out the arrests and to remove the bomb makers to military custody. So far, even under heavy attack, the IDF personnel had exercised rigid discipline.
But even as the first Arab prisoners were loaded onto trucks, the first real-live bullets were being fired. Not by the Israelis, but by Palestinian snipers, now ensconced on wasteland on the Haarat Al-Sheik. They were firing from various vantage points, on the edge of Haarat Al-Sheik, east of the crossroads with the sun behind them.
The Israeli Paratroopers, now crouching and running forward, hurled gas grenades into the wasteland and opened up a fusillade of covering fire while the searching troops raced for the safety of the only open building — the workshop where the arms and bomb-making materials were stored.
The Paratroopers, having temporarily silenced the snipers, headed for the same cover, and quite suddenly the building was full of Israeli troops, all massing in the stairwell, attempting to reach firing positions on the top two floors of the four-story building.
Immediately the air was filled with machine-gun fire, then the blast of real hand grenades as more Israeli paratroopers came up to clear the wasteland positions.
No one saw the Hamas terrorist leader, the one who had been trying to coordinate resistance to the methodical Israeli sweep through these most sensitive desert streets. Dressed in denim jeans and jacket, with the black-and-white-checked headdress of his nation slung over his shoulders, the young warrior, no more than twenty- five years old, wielded a handheld antitank rocket launcher. He fired one round, at one hundred yards' close range, straight through a downstairs window of the workshop.
The rocket exploded with a mind-blowing roar in the confined space, instantly blasting through the ceiling, and the one above it, before bringing down the entire building in a choking fireball of dust, sand, and rubble.
Fourteen Israelis were killed, seventeen injured. Only twelve of them managed to climb out of the wreckage, all with their eardrums shattered by the blast, their clothing in shreds, blood everywhere, faces blackened. Some of them were appallingly disfigured, hardly able to walk, four of them had lost arms or legs.
Within seconds the atrocity was reported to the Paratroops Company Headquarters, and reinforcements were immediately on their way into the Haarat Al-Sheik area; the Israelis were hell-bent on seeking out the perpetrators. They were desperate for revenge, never mind the rule book. Never mind Major Kerman's advice.
Israeli drivers gunned six ambulances crammed with nurses and medics down Route 35 right in the rear of the convoy of seething Paratroopers. Sirens screamed as they raced along Al-Qarantina Street, and within ten minutes of the blast the Israelis were leaping from the trucks, stunned at the sight that greeted them. Surrounded by the terribly wounded and dying men, their colleagues were helpless, and the snipers were beginning to open fire from the wasteland again, straight at the ground immediately in front of the devastated workshop where the grisly scenario was taking place.
Rarely had an Israeli brigade reacted with such speed and ferocity. The younger paratroopers formed up and stormed the wasteland from both flanks, hurling in grenades, firing from the hip. The Palestinians turned to run but were cut down in their tracks, women and children in the side streets were caught in the cross fire.
Hamas leaders were blasting away from behind low walls with three machine guns, but they were silenced by the grenades of the Israeli storm troopers. This had developed into a truly major confrontation, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The Israeli troops had decided to wipe out the Palestinian fighters, and they were well on the way to doing it, driving dozens of Arab freedom fighters back across the Jerusalem Road, many of them wounded.
