The Terror That Will Not Quit

By Matt Rees/Jerusalem

The alert reached the Jerusalem police mobile war room at 3 p.m. Monday. The green bus--borrowed from an Israeli transport company and fitted inside with computers, phones and desks--pulled up at the Haas Promenade, a high overlook with a view of the Old City. Officers of the police, the army and the Shin Bet, the domestic spy agency, rushed to the parked bus to coordinate the hunt. The target: Mohammed al-Ghoul, 22, a student who, according to an intelligence report, had been dispatched by a Nablus cell of the militant group Hamas with orders to blow himself up among Israeli civilians in Jerusalem. Exactly where and when al-Ghoul would strike, the men on the bus didn't know.

The officials in the war room worked through the night. They were aided by officers of the border police, who put more than 1,000 of their troops on Jerusalem's streets on the lookout for al-Ghoul, and by agents from undercover units, including the expert Unit 33 of the Jerusalem police. As Jerusalem slept, conflicting intelligence reports trickled in. One said al-Ghoul had entered the city; another suggested he was still in the West Bank. As the sun rose over the golden Dome of the Rock, the officers knew the riskiest period had arrived: the hours of the busy morning commute. Just before 8 a.m., they heard a deep blast. The noise carried three miles from where al-Ghoul blew himself up on a bus like the one housing the makeshift war room. Nineteen Israelis died with him. Now, after 17 hours of fruitless hunting, the war-room bus pulled away from the promenade and sped to the site of the carnage.

As the suicide attacks multiply, Israeli security forces face a daunting task. Even as they hunted al-Ghoul, they were tracking intelligence that four other Palestinian suicide bombers were trying to enter Jerusalem. Israel's Operation Defensive Shield, a series of raids on West Bank towns that ended in late April, yielded a bonanza of intelligence from the 1,700 Palestinians arrested as terrorist suspects. The information has helped Israel thwart 86% of attempted bombings, according to Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer. But those that slip through are devastating. In the wake of Defensive Shield, Israelis have suffered 64 major terror attacks claiming the lives of 83 victims, including 33 last week.

The day after al-Ghoul's attack, another bomber blew himself up at a bus stop on a busy Jerusalem crossroad. In the war room, officers were juggling eight separate alerts about suicide attackers trying to penetrate the city. After rushing to the scene at French Hill Junction and stopping his car about 60 yds. short of the blast site, a security officer turned to see a dismembered body that had been blown past where he had parked. "All the attacks we've prevented are worth nothing," the horrified officer said, "if such an awful thing still happens." The next day, two Palestinian militants crept into an Israeli settlement in the West Bank and shot dead five Israelis, including a mother and three of her children.

The surge in terrorist attacks since Defensive Shield has come as no surprise. Despite Israel's well-equipped forces and its highly developed intelligence capabilities, its security experts know they cannot stop the bombers entirely. When militants are as motivated as the Palestinians are now, when their inspiration is only heightened by Israel's counterattacks on Palestinian communities, when the terrorists' technology is as simple as strapping home-brewed explosives onto willing human bombs, deterrence is impossible and prevention a matter of hit or miss.

Still, it is the job of the security services to do what they can, and based on their recommendations, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has promised to retaliate even more harshly than he did with Defensive Shield. With a new operation, code-named Determined Path, Sharon promises to reoccupy parts of the West Bank ceded to Palestinian control under the Oslo peace accords--not for a matter of days, as in the past, but indefinitely, says Sharon, "as long as terror continues." It's unclear whether he can pull it off, either logistically or politically. But if he does, it will be the most dramatic reversal of the Oslo process since the first agreement was signed in 1993.

The latest violence has flummoxed the White House's diplomatic efforts. The Bush Administration had hoped at last to cease issuing conflicting signals and deliver a tough, pragmatic diplomatic agenda. The President had planned to deliver a speech last week promising U.S. recognition of a provisional Palestinian state in the territory now under self-rule, provided that Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority first met a series of strict conditions, including pushing democratic reforms and cracking down on terrorist networks. But after al-Ghoul's bus bombing, which Bush learned about in a 5 a.m. phone call from National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and the subsequent attacks, the White House postponed the speech and began revising its language. "The tone of the speech has changed," says a White House official. "What was already pretty tough on the Palestinians has gotten even tougher."

At the same time, the Bush Administration opted not to criticize Israel for threatening to march back into West Bank towns. For several weeks, Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter has told Sharon that the only way to prevent terrorist attacks is to take full control of Palestinian cities until a fence along the West Bank's border with Israel can be erected. Completing just the first phase of the wall could take as long as eight months to a year.

With Determined Path, Israeli security officials hope to finish what they started with Defensive Shield. Under U.S. and European pressure, Sharon wrapped up the first operation faster than the army or Shin Bet liked. The armed forces wanted four months; Sharon gave them one. By the time Israel ended the campaign in the final days of April, it had arrested Hamas' top and mid-level activists, according to Israeli intelligence, but hadn't worked down to the legmen who carry out surveillance on target locations and run errands for the bombmakers during the planning of operations. Of 90 activists in the Nablus Hamas cell known to Israeli intelligence, only the top 60 were arrested or killed. Mohana Taher was among the low-level Hamas men who remained at large. With his superiors arrested or dead, Taher, 26, took control of the Nablus cell and plotted al-Ghoul's operation, Israeli officials say.

The new campaign is also targeting what the Israelis call ha-Masterim (the Masters). In Defensive Shield, Israeli forces picked up or killed all the Hamas men they knew of in the West Bank who had mastered the precise formulas for homemade explosives. But according to Israeli intelligence, a few top Hamas operatives in the Gaza Strip slipped through Israeli security to the West Bank and have begun to produce explosives there, reinvigorating the West Bank wing of the group that had been on the ropes during and just after Defensive Shield.

Sending his soldiers back into Palestinian towns for a prolonged period is a risky strategy for Sharon. Though the move suits his party, the hawkish Likud, it is unpopular with his coalition partners from the centrist Labor Party. The day after Sharon's decision, Defense Minister Ben-Eliezer, a Labor member, told aides, "I haven't agreed to reconquer any land." Ben-Eliezer's aides say the Israeli troops will probably stay inside the Palestinian towns only a few weeks. Labor doesn't want to see Israel rebuild the system of military government it dismantled when it handed over the towns to the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo accords. As a Defense Ministry official puts it, "We don't want to handle their sewage." Even if Sharon withstands coalition pressures, a prolonged reoccupation would bring international criticism. That risk was underscored when Israeli forces looking for Islamic Jihad activists in Jenin last week opened fire on Palestinian civilians who mistakenly thought that the Israeli-imposed curfew had been lifted. Four Palestinians, including three children, were killed.

There are also operational difficulties in keeping the Palestinian towns under occupation. The army's recent pattern has been to move in for a few days at a time whenever intelligence suggested a terrorist operation was being prepared. Israel's standing army has enough manpower to lock down only two West Bank cities at a time. To control all nine major towns and the largest villages would require a big call-up of reserves. That would be unpopular with a public that has not yet seen a real, permanent improvement in security despite the huge Defensive Shield call-up. Many Labor ministers reason that only peace negotiations with the Palestinians can stop the violence.

Hamas' hard-core supporters have no interest in peace talks; their stated goal is Israel's destruction. But more moderate Palestinians, including some of the people behind the violence, echo Labor's argument. "The Israelis are trying to treat this problem as a military one," says a militant in Jerusalem from Arafat's Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.). "It's not. The Israelis can't stop this through military methods."

Nothing can come of diplomacy, however, unless both leaderships are prepared to stop fighting. Arafat advisers say P.L.O. Secretary-General Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, has been urging Arafat to adopt a conciliatory line, ending the violence and restarting peace talks; that at least would placate Washington. In Arafat's Ramallah office last week, Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo criticized Abbas for being "soft with America," according to Arafat aides who were present. By their account, a furious Abbas threw a small plastic bottle at Abed Rabbo's head and stormed out of the office, even as Arafat appealed to the two men to make up. People close to Abbas say he doesn't believe Arafat truly supports his attempts to calm the situation. The Palestinian leader made a statement condemning the suicide attacks against civilians, but if he can't convince his closest advisers that he is sincere, he will have no chance with the Israelis.

--With reporting by Aharon Klein/Jerusalem, Jamil Hamad/Bethlehem and James Carney/Washington

With reporting by Aharon Klein/Jerusalem, Jamil Hamad/Bethlehem and James Carney/Washington