A hit and a miss

Workers sift through the rubble of terror mastermind Salah Shehadeh's house in Gaza.
(AP)

Israel's two-year quest to kill the leader of Hamas's military wing finally bore fruit, but at a hefty cost in human lives and diplomatic fallout. Was is worth it?

Before the dust settled Tuesday morning, military sources lauded the Gaza bombing of Salah Shehadeh's home as one of the most important strikes against the Palestinian terror infrastructure since the start of the war some 22 months ago. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon went so far as to call it "one of our greatest successes."

But as the 16 bodies were identified - and it turned out that 10 of them were children - some Palestinians privately said that Israel's assassination of the Hamas arch terrorist was a resounding public relations victory for them.

In killing one its most implacable foes - the blood of dozens of Israelis stained Shehadeh's hands - Israel may have tipped the balance of international opinion against it. World opinion had hitherto kept relatively quiet about the return of Israeli tanks to Palestinian cities, and their virtual house arrest of at least 700,000 Palestinians.

The strike may also have torpedoed a reported call - an hour and a half before the bombing - by Fatah for a unilateral Palestinian cease-fire. Moreover, Fatah's calls may have been made in coordination with Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin made a point of telling Reuters on Monday that his movement would consider halting suicide attacks if Israel met certain vague conditions:

"Basically what I would say to the occupation army is to leave... the Palestinian cities in all the West Bank that were occupied. And stop your aggression, demolishing homes. Release prisoners and stop assassinations. Once the occupation and all those measures against our people stop, we are ready to totally study stopping martyrdom operations, in a positive way."

Regardless of whether this patently unacceptable - from Israel's viewpoint - offer could have theoretically led to something positive, it's obvious now that there's no chance of pursuing it.

As details of the attack and its planning trickle out, and Israelis brace themselves for a renewed round of terror after a month of "relative quiet," several questions begin to resound:

Why did the IDF not anticipate the destructive force of a one-ton missile dropped in a densely populated urban area?

How could Israel's intelligence service, one sophisticated enough to pinpoint the location of the constantly hiding terrorist mastermind, not know that Shehadeh's family was with him in the building?

And finally, to what extent were Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon aware of the possible civilian casualties, and why did they give the strike the green light when a possible Palestinian cease-fire was in the works?

REGARDLESS of what Israel's leaders knew, the criticism came fast and furious. An almost inaudibly somber White House Spokesman, Ari Fleischer mumbled that US President George W. Bush thought it a "heavy-handed attack" that did not "cont
ribute to peace."

Palestine Authority chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat charged that "Sharon knows there will be a response and he wants a continuation of the bloodshed as he wants to prevent any possibility of a political process."

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana called it an "extra-judicial killing operation," which "comes at a time when both Israelis and Palestinians were working very seriously to curb violence and restore cooperative security arrangements."

Besides such howls of dismay from the US, UN and European Union, the Gaza air strike may also draw scrutiny from the International Criminal Court (ICC), some Israeli jurists fear. "We have been preparing for such a suit for two years, and are working closely with the Foreign and Defense Ministries, and we believe are prepared to handle it," says Justice Ministry spokesman Ya'acov Galanti who added that his ministry intends to defend any and every Israeli indicted.

In the government, Tuesday's early morning glee over killing Shehadeh turned to chagrin by evening. The prime minister and defense minister were deflecting criticism by implicitly blaming faulty intelligence coordination for the civilian deaths.

"We have very often in the past canceled operations because we felt the risk to civilians was too high. But of course this kind of operation is not always 100% successful," former deputy defense minister and current Transportation Minister Ephraim Sneh irritably tells The Jerusalem Post.

Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Silvan Shalom explained on Tuesday that "Anyone who thinks or imagines that the prime minister, the defense minister, or the chief of staff would have decided on and approved carrying out this attack in this place knowing that this would harm innocent people, simply has no idea what he is talking about."

Not so, former chief of General Staff, Lt. Gen. (Res.) Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, tells the Post. Before every major action the IDF brass sit down and put all the details on the table, he says, including elements of the plan that could possibly go wrong, as well as the chances for success. They then summarize the prospects for the political echelon - in this case Sharon and Ben-Eliezer - who must agree to any such strike.

Unless the IDF top brass willfully misled the powerful duo, Sharon and Ben-Eliezer must have been aware that there would be an air strike, that it would be carried out by an F-16, and that its payload was a one-ton bomb, the inference being that they should have recognized the possibility of significant collateral damage. Indeed, of the 16 people killed in the bombing, only four were in Shehadeh's house.

Lipkin-Shahak argues that civilian casualties could have been avoided because the green light for an operation like this "does not have to be decided upon in a split second as in a war situation."

From Lipkin-Shahak's point of view, a targeted killing is a success, "only if the target is responsible for killing Israelis." But, "if civilians, including children, are killed, then an operation cannot be considered a success."

Yet despite denials to the contrary, it is evident that decision makers were well aware that at least two civilians, Shehadeh's wife and daughter were in the four-story building along with his aide-de-camp Zuhair Nasser.

IS ISRAEL sending a brutal message to the enemy leadership: You can no longer hide behind your women and children; and you will go to the grave knowing that your survivors will be hearing from us - in the form of house demolitions and banishment?

Gone are previous moral qualms about demolishing the homes of terrorists. Gone are the taboos against "collective punishment" - the deportation of family members from the West Bank to Gaza is on the agenda, despite Attorney-General Elyakim Rubinstein's repeated advice against it.

Former defense and foreign minister, Moshe Arens expresses little sympathy for the civilian deaths: "Israel is engaged in a war - in a war to defend its citizens - and the very fact that they [terrorists] hide out in populated urban areas makes it inevitable that they will suffer civilian casualties."

But credible Palestinian sources say that Shehadeh never, in fact, lived in his house. As the Number One most wanted Hamas operative he was constantly in hiding. He rarely slept in the same place on consecutive nights. Apparently, he was "just visiting his family." Which leads critics of the loss of civilian life to argue that the IDF could have waited for him to move before it struck.

Any post mortem by the IDF and Shin Bet will likely explore why the air force didn't use Apache helicopters - a tool that can be better calibrated for pinpoint accuracy than a fighter-bomber.

The answer could be technical rather than political. According to a source in the air force, only a jet can carry a one-ton bomb believed necessary to penetrate to the center of the four-story building, thus ensuring the death of all its occupants.

The air force did not expect such a high casualty count, stresses the source, though it likely expected anybody in the house would have died in the attack. "After all, the point of this type of bomb, as opposed to rockets fired from an Apache, is to totally penetrate and destroy the building, killing everything inside." When asked how such a powerful bomb meant to annihilate Shehadeh's house was going to leave nearby houses intact, the source simply shrugged.

According to terror expert, Boaz Ganor, director of the Institute for Counter-Terrorism, "the attack's timing and location was based more on the exact time that the Israelis got concrete intelligence, and has little to do with Israeli policy."

Ganor explains that a military strike like this one can only be launched after an incontrovertible intelligence tip.

"Yet the problem is that such tips are priceless, but have only a very short shelf-life; if they are not acted upon quickly, they are worthless."

Simply put, Shehadeh had been at the top of Israel's wanted list for two years, when, on Tuesday night, opportunity struck.

Many of the IDF's previous decisions to eliminate senior terrorists may have boiled down to a stark cost-benefit analysis: does the terrorist's killing justify the collateral damage in dead civilians?

According to Ganor, chances are there was a failure in the IDF's analysis; the estimate of civilian casualties was way off.

Or, he adds, top IDF brass - along with the prime minister and defense minister - assessed that the number of people Shehadeh murdered, coupled with the number of people he planned to kill, justified his liquidation, even factoring in the loss of Palestinian civilians. Indeed, he was such a big fish, that policy makers may have judged his removal necessary even though his killing may generate yet another wave of terror and dead Israelis.

And, if recent history is an indicator, the wave will come. For instance, in the 50 days after Fatah leader Ra'ed Karmi was liquidated, the Tanzim and the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades claimed responsibility for attacks that took the lives of 57 Israeli citizens. Another eery coincidence: before Karmi was assassinated, people spoke of the preceding period as being "relatively calm," something they're now saying about Shehadeh. "Relatively" is, of course, relative: in the past few weeks terrorists struck at Emmanuel, killing nine, and in Tel Aviv, killing four.

Warnings of a "retaliatory" wave of terror don't strike Transportation Minister Sneh as particularly credible. "There were attacks before we killed Shehadeh and there will be attacks after." The reason the number of attacks dwindled of late is due to Israel's siege of Palestinian cities.

BUT EVEN as Israel braces itself for possible massive retaliation - some fear on the scale of the wave of suicide bombings that rocked the state in March - the operation may well have a beneficial security impact after all. The new blessing for Palestinian leaders like Shehadeh is: "May Allah bless and keep you far away from us."

A Palestinian journalist who lives less than a kilometer from Shehadeh's wrecked apartment, told The Jerusalem Post that "people are now looking for wanted men. They are stopping them in the middle of the street and will now begin asking for their identification before they enter a specific residential neighborhood. This is wrenching and most people think - do I have to stop them - but no one feels safe. How do you know who will be Shehadeh's number two, and where the missile will come from?"

According to the journalist, who for security purposes asked to remain anonymous, this kind of scrutiny even occurs at parties and gatherings among friends. But terrorists are not the only ones being targeted by the wary eye of locals.

"Someone must have told the Shabak [Shin Bet] that Shehadeh was visiting his house; that someone must live among us, and now everyone is looking for collaborators."

On the night of the assassination, the journalist, who once had close contact with Israeli colleagues - now such contact is almost tantamount to treason - felt it imperative to join in the rescue effort.

"I probably would have helped out no matter what," he explains, "but last night I did more than my share, handling pieces of human flesh, working feverishly to extricate bodies and clear rubble. I did it, partially to show that I am not a collaborator, that I am one of the people."

Pointing to the runaway anger of the mob attending the funerals of the first Gaza victims, the source says he doubts that Shehadeh's removal from the scene will in any way stop terror.

Hebrew University Professor Yaron Ezrahi, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, agrees. The timing of the strike was a conscious effort on the part of the prime minister to stall possible talks, he believes. "It is the same disruptive tactic he used when Karmi was assassinated after a month of relative quiet."

In gaining a relatively small military victory, says Ezrahi, Israel was forced to tread on a moral mine.

"The strike was a colossal error. Our leaders have failed to understand that creating symmetry between the terrorists and us legitimates them and delegitimizes us. Legitimizing terror is their greatest victory, and represents our greatest loss."

There are numerous questions about Tuesday's events: were intelligence judgments off? Was the timing bad? Will the international community once again galvanize against Israel? Did Israel blow an opportunity, however remote, for a cease-fire?

Yet in the final analysis, the Shehadeh killing - and the implicit strategy of no longer holding as blameless non-combatant Palestinian family and neighbors of major terrorists - will be judged by whether it enhances Israeli security.

You can not give the terrorists a sanctuary that they achieve simply by surrounding themselves with civilians. Most of the complaining about the Israeli attack are from people, who say nothing about the Palie terrorist attacks. These people simply believe that the Jews ought to let themselves be killed. BTW, this same crowd believe Americans ought to let themselves be killed too, but they can't say that aloud without consequences. It's safe to dump on the Jews though, but all Americans are Jews now. Even the Chompskyites, who be the first murdered by the Islamo-fascists.

How could Israel's intelligence service, one sophisticated enough to pinpoint the location of the constantly hiding terrorist mastermind, not know that Shehadeh's family was with him in the building?

How could Shehada, a man sophisticated enough to plan well timed and well targetted suicide attacks and able to avoid being captured by Israel, not know that using children as human shields was very risky and could result in their deaths?

The palestinains have openly declared war on Israel and want to wipe it off the face of the earth. Did anyone say a word as we bombed innocents in Serbia? What about all the innocent people killed in our two nuclear drops? Or the fire bombings over Dresden in Germany? The palestinans got only a fraction of what they deserve from Israel.

Day after day palestinain terrorists blow up Israeli Children. Now Israel responds and kills a few kids. I say good for Israel. In fact too bad it wasn't 1,800 palestinains killed. If Israeli Children are open targets of the palestinian parasites than Israel has a right to respond with force and go after the palestinians.

I saw September 12, and the joy in the eyes and mouths of the palsestinains after the WTC was blown up. I can only hope that some of those parasites were killed on this latest raid by Israel. Good for Israel. I can only hope they wipe the rest of the palestians out.

Soon we will need Israel's help as we go after Iraq. The palestinians openly support Iraq.

Did anyone say a word as we bombed innocents in Serbia? What about all the innocent people killed in our two nuclear drops? Or the fire bombings over Dresden in Germany?

America does it too. Nice. Bash America in defense of Israel. Taking lessons from Dore Gold? He went on TV and defended Jenin by saying Americans killed civilians in Afghanistan.

Why not bring up slavery, lynchings and how women couldn't vote in America too?

We give Israel billions of dollars and they repay us by trashing us. They don't have the guts to stand up like a real nation and take responsibility for what they do. Israel always shifts the blame to someone else.

...we are ready to totally study stopping martyrdom operations...

what a strong desire for peace... this serial murderer is a "spiritual leader"??? one more suicide bomber and this guy should go next, collateral damage or not. As long as they follow "leaders" like Yassin, Palestinians deserve what they get.

This attack was clearly intended to derail the peace talks that were about to be initiated.

Funny, the HAMAS was bragging the day before the attack that they were going to step up the attacks. What "real" peace talks!!! I suggest you get "real".

If Israel is willing to surrender to the Palestinians and return to them the land won from Jordan and Egypt, Hamas "Might" consider stopping mass murder as a political expression. Yeah, that is real peace talk all right...

The point of this article is "was it worth it". This guy has killed hundreds, killing him cost tens. Duhhhh, it was worth it already!

Rule One: The Palies lie.
Rule Two: When in doubt, refer to Rule One.

You're buying Palie propaganda. "Oh, if it wasn't for the Israeli attack, we would've stopped our martyrdom operations. We would've stopped the attacks."

You're foolish to believe such a thing. In any case, according to the Palies, the Israelis make them do the terror attacks and the Israelis are always going to be Israelis, so how can terror attacks be stopped?

Please change your screenname, by calling the Israelis terrorists, you insult our Constitution, unless you're refering to the Palie constitution. Yeah, that could be it.

As I am sure you know, in a war situation innocent people die so that others may live. If the enemy chooses to have their wives and children living with them, then there is a good chance their families will die. If the palis were actually fighting a war, their leaders and troops would be living elsewhere, away from their families. Instead they choose to reside, or hide, among the civilian population putting each of them at risk.
It would be great if each bomb could be set up to kill a select group of people, or a single individual. We just haven't figured out how to do that. The difference I see is that when Israel does something like this, it is against a legitimate target, with unfortunate collateral damage. When the palis explode their bombs, it is their intent to kill innocent people. They need to be stopped at whatever cost.

Once the occupation and all those measures against our people stop, we are ready to totally study stopping martyrdom operations, in a positive way."

One notes that he does not say they WILL stop, just that they will study stopping (in a positive way) Like totally!

I am not bashing the USA. What the USA is doing in Afghanistan is correct. There are no innocent people in war.

Unfortunately my country (my heritage goes back to before the revolutionary war - which my relatives fought in as members of the Green Mtn Boys) is populated by liberals and idiots who blame the whole world's problems on Jews. Instead of saying Jew, you say Israel.

I have a question to ask you. Do you openly wear a swastika, or just a lapel pin?

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