Warriors of God (49 page)

“Israel is making it very difficult for us because of you coming here,” said Bassem Khatib to a group of us who wandered into the village one August morning. “When the Israeli soldiers see someone coming into Ghajar they close the gate at the [southern] entrance to the village and we are stuck here. It doesn't matter if someone is sick, they won't open the gate to let them out.”

Most residents studiously ignored us. A young girl hurried past. Would she stop and talk for a moment? “Talk? About what?” she replied, with a nervous smile and an apologetic half shrug.

A convoy of cars drove slowly past, kicking up a cloud of white dust. Stony-faced men, some with shaved heads and wearing black wraparound sunglasses, scowled at us through the windows.

“Israeli
mukhabarat
,” whispered one of the Lebanese journalists.

A car drove up from the southern end of the village and a cameraman and his colleague climbed out. “Hi, we're from Channel Two,” said the cameraman cheerfully, referring to Israel's leading television station. He shouldered his camera and began filming. The Lebanese reporters accompanying me glanced at each other uneasily as they realized that their faces would be splashed all over Israeli television that evening. It is illegal for Lebanese to have any contact with Israel.

“How did you get into the village?” the cameraman asked, apparently unaware that he had crossed the Blue Line and was standing on Lebanese soil. The Israeli and Lebanese cameramen stood two yards apart and filmed each other filming each other in part of a village that lay inside Lebanon but whose residents considered themselves Syrian nationals even though they held Israeli citizenship. Such was the unusual position in which Ghajar found itself.

The encounter with the Israeli camera crew underlined just how easy it was to smuggle goods or information from Lebanon into Israel through Ghajar. Before long, the Hezbollah fighters began barring visitors from entering the village. Their command post in the old bomb shelter was festooned with yellow Hezbollah flags and camouflage netting slung over the entrance.

A Hezbollah man accompanied me on a stroll down the side of the village to the new security fence along the Blue Line. Little stirred in Ghajar. A few children played in a street, and a couple of elderly residents stared blankly at us. No one attempted to strike up a conversation. Across the hot, grassy plain a few hundred yards to the southeast lay a large Israeli compound, a line of Merkava tanks and armored personnel carriers baking in the scorching sun.

Did the Hezbollah fighter and his comrades have any contact with the residents of Ghajar?

“No,” he said. “It's forbidden.”

By whom?

“Orders,” he replied.

That was not exactly true. In September 2002, the Israeli authorities broke up the biggest spy ring yet. Altogether, eleven Israeli Arabs were detained, six of them serving with the Israeli army, including the leader of the ring, Omar Hayeb, a lieutenant colonel. Ironically, Hayeb had lost an eye to a Hezbollah roadside bomb in 1996. The lure of cash and hard drugs evidently overcame any lingering resentment Hayeb might have felt toward his former adversaries. He was recruited in late 2000 by Ramzi Nohra's brother, Kamil. According to a Lebanese intelligence source, Ramzi ran the cell in coordination with a Hezbollah intelligence officer, while Kamil was the link man to Hayeb.

In exchange for cash and drugs, Hayeb fulfilled requests for items and information, such as large-scale maps of the Shebaa Farms and northern Golan Heights and details of Israeli army compounds along the border, including surveillance equipment used on the bases. Hezbollah even attempted to obtain and crack the Israeli army's radio encryption code, dubbed Otiyot, Hebrew for “letters.”
⁵

The exposure of the Hayeb spy ring stunned the Israeli army and sent a tremor of unease throughout Israeli society. “When a high-ranking
officer, a scion of a loyal and well-rooted community, one of the system's darlings, one of the most senior signatories to the alliance of blood between us [Jews] and those [Arabs] who live among us, forsakes IDF soldiers with such ease to the graces of Hezbollah—that is a sign that something fundamental has gone awry. The alliance of blood is coming apart at the seams,” wrote the Israeli columnist Ben Caspit in the
Maariv
daily.
⁶

With the discovery of the Omar Hayeb espionage cell in September 2002, Israel's patience with Ramzi Nohra appears to have run out. During the eight years he had cooperated with Hezbollah and the military intelligence services of Syria and Lebanon, Ramzi had played roles in some of the most sophisticated and successful operations waged against Israel—the capture of Ahmad Hallaq in 1996, the assassination of General Erez Gerstein in 1999, the abduction of the three Israeli soldiers from the Shebaa Farms in 2000, and the handling of drugs-for-intelligence spy rings in Israel following the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. The Israelis decided it was time to settle accounts.

On the morning of December 6, 2002, Ramzi, accompanied by his thirty-year-old nephew Elie Issa, drove his Mercedes out of Ibl es-Saqi village and turned right onto the main road heading north. He had driven barely two miles from his home when a rock-disguised IED exploded beside his vehicle. Both Ramzi and Issa were killed instantly.

As soon as the news of the assassination broke, a team from Hezbollah hurriedly drove to Ramzi's home and locked one of the rooms in his villa, according to a Lebanese intelligence source. What was in the room remains unknown, but Ramzi held many secrets that Hezbollah and others would prefer stay hidden.

Nasrallah, attending Issa's funeral in the Bekaa Valley, vowed to “cut off the criminal terrorist hand that reached this martyr and the martyr Ramzi.” And revenge was swift in coming. Two days after Ramzi's death, a powerful roadside bomb exploded beside the border fence in the western sector as an Israeli army Humvee passed by. The two soldiers in the vehicle were badly wounded; one of them lost both his legs in the blast. A statement claiming responsibility was released in Beirut by the “Ramzi
Nohra Martyr Group.” Hezbollah denied any knowledge, although no one doubted that the party had perpetrated the attack, just as it was obvious that Israel was responsible for killing Ramzi.

Even though Israel remained silent about Ramzi's death, Hezbollah and others who closely followed the cycle of violence in south Lebanon recognized an implicit claim of responsibility in the location the assassins selected for the roadside bomb attack. For Ramzi Nohra died in exactly the same place as the IED explosion nearly four years earlier that had killed General Gerstein.

Israel's own actions along the border sometimes played into Hezbollah's hands, helping the organization make its case for retaining its arms. The most intrusive example was the near daily overflights in Lebanese airspace, which had resumed following the abduction of the three soldiers in October 2000. Israel's sensitivity over its water resources also created a series of unnecessary crises between 2001 and 2002, swiftly seized by Hezbollah as evidence of Israel's ill intentions toward Lebanon.

In March 2001, the Lebanese government installed a small pump and a pipe to supply drinking water to the tiny village of Wazzani from the nearby spring that bubbles up into the Hasbani River. The Hasbani flows into Israel two miles south of the spring, where it forms one of three tributaries of the Jordan River, which runs into the Sea of Galilee, Israel's largest source of fresh water.

Although Israel had been informed of the pumping project a month earlier, the Israeli government issued a flurry of warnings against Lebanese attempts to divert water and threatened to destroy the new pumping station. The fuss died down when the UN pointed out to the Israelis that the pipe was only four inches in diameter. But three months later, Hussein Abdullah, a local landowner, inadvertently roiled the waters when he began installing a six-inch-diameter pipe to irrigate his farmland. The Israelis cried foul once more and warned that continued
pumping from the Hasbani River could trigger a confrontation between Lebanon and Israel.

In the blinding heat of summer, the only source of water for the Hasbani River was the Wazzani spring, a tranquil pool of shallow water some twenty yards across, strewn with black basalt boulders and shaded by oleander and eucalyptus trees. Years earlier, the Israelis had installed two small pumps at the spring to provide drinking water for Ghajar, which lies adjacent on the eastern bank of the Hasbani. The Lebanese authorities had allowed the pumping to continue after the Israeli withdrawal, presumably because the recipients of the water were Syrian Alawites rather than Jewish Israelis.

When Lebanon announced in the summer of 2002 that it was expanding the project by installing a larger pipe to convey water to some sixty villages, Ariel Sharon called it a casus belli and warned that the pumping station could be destroyed if the project went ahead.

Such inflammatory rhetoric was a godsend for Hezbollah. Nasrallah cautioned Israel that it would fall into an “unrelenting death mill … from village to village, house to house and canyon to canyon” if it proceeded with its plans to attack the pumping site.
⁷

The UN and the United States were dragged into the dispute and attempted to mediate a solution. Ultimately, Lebanon was within its rights to draw off some of the water, and there was nothing Israel could do about it. What should have been a minor infrastructure project was inflated into a national celebration when the pumping facility was formally inaugurated in September 2002. Before a crowd of thousands, President Emile Lahoud turned on the tap, washed his hands, and drank some of the water as hundreds of balloons were released and carried by the gentle evening breeze toward the grassy slopes of the Golan Heights.

While the Shebaa Farms was the designated “hot” zone for combat operations, Hezbollah constantly devised new tactics to keep the Israelis
on edge elsewhere along the border. These tactics were sufficiently subtle and low-key to stay within the rules of the game and prevent an unwanted escalation while at the same time robust enough to reinforce Hezbollah's deterrence posture and preserve the “balance of terror.” The tactics were steadily refined between 2000 and 2006 as the rules of the game evolved.

“The battle is open with Israel,” Sheikh Naim Qassem explained to me in 2004. “We are not supposed to make them comfortable. It is a basic rule of combat to make the enemy nervous. And we try to achieve this with whatever tool we have at our disposal, be it political or military. Israel must understand that the resistance is present and watching and can reach them at any time.”

In response to Israel's near-daily breaches of Lebanese airspace with jets and UAVs, Hezbollah in January 2002 began firing 57 mm antiaircraft shells across the border. The foot-long shells were not aimed at the jets; instead, they exploded with a loud bang high above Israeli border settlements, spattering whatever lay below with light shrapnel. The new tactic had been in development for some months as Hezbollah mulled a way of confronting Israel's aerial reconnaissance flights. Initially, Hezbollah considered firing modified RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenades or small-caliber Katyusha rockets across the border, as “noisemakers” rather than to score casualties or damage. But after test-firing them in a deep valley near the border and launching them out to sea, they soon found that the RPGs lacked range and the Katyushas were unsuitable, so they settled on the 57 mm cannons.

Hezbollah eventually installed up to twenty antiaircraft cannons covering the length of the border, some close to the Blue Line. I stumbled across the location of one by chance in 2002. Driving along a back road near the border early one afternoon, I pulled over for a moment to have a look at an old SLA outpost near the village of Talloussa. As I parked, a bearded man dressed in a camouflage uniform emerged from the entrance riding a small scooter. His jaw dropped as he saw a foreigner climb out of the car. The fighter spoke into his walkie-talkie to summon his comrades, and they, too, emerged from the compound. They searched my car and took my bag with my notebook and camera
along with my wristwatch and wallet. They allowed me to call Hezbollah's press office in Beirut on my mobile phone. I handed the phone to one of the Hezbollah men, and the press assistant Hussein Naboulsi vouched for me. But it would be some time before I was released.

The Hezbollah men told me to drive to nearby Markaba and park beside the mosque, where someone would meet me. When I arrived at the mosque a few minutes later, a bearded and demure young man ushered me into an empty room at the back and offered me tea. It took three hours for the requisite checks to be made; the local military commanders had apparently been in a lengthy meeting and could not be disturbed until it was over. A Hezbollah man eventually arrived at the mosque, carrying my belongings in a plastic bag. He insisted that I check that everything was there before leaving. As I stepped outside, the early evening stillness was broken by the thump of antiaircraft rounds. Looking to the southeast I could just make out the tip of the barrel of the gun in the old Talloussa outpost and see dust and smoke rising from the position. The 57 mm rounds exploded over the border in white cotton-ball puffs of smoke against a Prussian-blue evening sky.

As the months ticked by, Hezbollah began to lower its aim, sending the shells deeper into Israel and increasing the risk of civilian casualties. In August 2003, a sixteen-year-old boy was killed by falling shrapnel in the border settlement of Shelomi, the first Israeli civilian to die since the withdrawal from Lebanon three years earlier. Israel ended its restraint and sent jets into Lebanon to bomb the antiaircraft battery that had fired the fatal rounds. In the following months, Israel struck twice more against Hezbollah positions in response to bursts of cross-border antiaircraft fire. The Israelis had called Hezbollah's bluff, and the tactic came to an end.