On Tuesday morning, the Prime Minister's Office issued a statement that interim Prime Minister Yair Lapid had contacted GOC Central Command, Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs; commander of the Israel Police's counter-terror unit; and the head of the Shin Bet security agency's operations division, and thanked them for the operation in which fugitive Ibrahim Nablusi was killed in Nablus. The brief message was a rare mention of the Shin Bet's operations division and its head, whose part in the past week's events is more dramatic than that reported – and more dominant than that any other person who participated.
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In fact, the Operations Division (and the Shin Bet in general) are the ones mainly responsible for the success of the Gaza operation. The killing of two senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad military commanders in the Gaza Strip, Tayseer al-Jabari and Khaled Mansour, is down to them. Others worked alongside them – the IDF Southern Command, the Israeli Air Force and the 8200 Unit – but without having eliminated these two aces, it is doubtful whether the operation would have been crowned an unequivocal victory.
The Shin Bet is a secret organization that operates far from the public eye. The Operations Division is a bubble within a bubble: some of its operations are even kept from the other Shin Bet members. Its role is to find creative ways to realize organizational goals.
The last two heads of the Shin Bet, Nadav Argaman and Ronen Bar, rose through the ranks of the Operations Division and then led it. The current head of the division, N., rose through the ranks after serving in the IDF's elite Duvdevan unit, and followed a tortuous path to becoming its commander. The operation in Gaza was the highlight of his tenure thus far and has reaped impressive achievements by any criteria.
Between Samaria and Gaza
On Monday, 10 days ago, the IDF and Shin Bet arrested Bassam Saadi, a senior member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), in northern Samaria. It is not clear why this arrest – one of many hundreds of arrests carried out as part of Operation Breakwater – got the organization's military wing in Gaza riled up. It might have been the man's seniority, it might have been the fact that he was documented being dragged on the ground and bitten by a dog, and it might have been the fact that the organization's senior officials were in Tehran at the time. It is also possible that the organization's activists in Judea and Samaria put pressure on their colleagues in Gaza to do what they could to rescue them from the Israeli forces.
In one way or another, the PIJ in Gaza decided to respond. Formerly, the group's automatic response had been to launch rockets into Israeli territory. But rockets (as proven in the latest military operation) are often inaccurate, and the PIJ wanted blood. So they chose a different plan: to launch an anti-tank missile or use a sniper, which would guarantee Israelis would be hit and killed.
Israel's strong intelligence coverage in Gaza immediately uncovered the PIJ's intentions, which were understood as a severe warning. GOC Southern Command Maj. Gen. Eliezer Toledano decided to close off the entire region adjacent to Gaza to reduce the number of available targets to zero. There was immediate backlash, but Toledano was determined: the pain of the anti-tank missile that hit a bus carrying soldiers in 2018 -- which miraculously ended without dozens of fatalities – has never left him since. Life precedes the quality of life, he clarified, adding: "What will I be able to say to parents of the children who could be killed on the bus on the way to summer camp, or to the parents of the soldiers who could be killed by sniping?"
During the first few days of the escalation, Israel tried to wind down tensions quietly, pressuring Hamas to pressure the PIJ and get them to back down. Israel closed crossings to the Gaza Strip, laborers were prevented from entering Israel to work, good and fuel shipments were stopped, and fishing areas were limited. The Egyptians also joined the effort, and tried to use their influence to calm things down – but the PIJ refused to cooperate. As early as that Monday evening, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi gave orders to prepare for the Gaza operation.
All this time, the Shin Bet's Operations Division focused on alternatives. The organization collects information about its enemies year round: where they live and work, what cars they drive, who their family and friends are – every detail that might end up being useful, someday. This is an exhaustive process of collecting information of enemies in all sectors, but it is naturally more intense when it comes to heads of terrorist organizations, since carrying out strikes on them is considered a significant achievement.
Last Wednesday, two days after the initial alert and preparations, the Shin Bet was already inclined to take out Jabari. Mansour was also a target from the outset, but he was a much more complicated target than his northern counterpart: more violent and dangerous, and also much more experienced and cautious – in regular times and certainly in times of war.
Building an intelligence portrait for elimination is a complex affair. A puzzle of thousands of pieces of information, which the Israeli intelligence community in general and the Shin Bet in particular, are world champions in putting together. Shin Bet operatives are skilled at extracting bits of information and turning them into valuable intelligence. The combat fighters are trained in extracting information from the ground and compiling it into a complete picture. Part of the intelligence comes from human sources, and others from bugging or other cyber operations, overt information and various field operations.
Gaza is a more complicated area in which to operate in than some others. Unlike Lebanon or Iran, which are open to tourists, businessmen and other travelers, and which have constant potential for intelligence organizations, Gaza is barricaded and very suspicious, and anyone entering the region is searched and strictly monitored.
This requires the Shin Bet field personnel to be extremely careful, without thwarting the operation. The goal is for the target to continue their daily life without suspecting anything. When it comes to senior members of terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip, this is an exceptionally complex challenge. Some of them have been targeted for years and take extreme steps to ensure that they do not give Israel any chance to harm them -- never using cell phones, staying in safehouses, relying only on people they know they can trust, and even using innocent people as human shields.
Jabari, for example, was hiding on the sixth floor out in the 14-story Palestine Building in Gaza. There were civilians on the nearby floors and apartments. As the operation required zero errors, minimal collateral damage and no harm to children or Hamas – to avoid dragging that group into the conflict – it was vital to ensure that Jabari would be the sole target. Here too, it involved a complex intelligence challenge of building a complete image; this picture is passed on to IAF which turns it into an operational plan – which arms method should be used to ensure that the target is killed, without causing damage. The IAF reportedly chose a particularly challenging and complex method: aiming a bomb with a fuse at the seventh floor, which would penetrate the floor down to the sixth floor and explode there, and then fire several more bombs into the apartment itself.
Last Thursday, the Shin Bet continued to refine the plan. N. spoke almost hourly with Toledano in the Southern Command and with A., head of the southern region in the Shin Bet, to complete preparations. In the meantime, the political echelon approved the plan, out of three alternatives presented by the IDF, which was the one the military itself recommended.
A decision was taken to wait a little longer, in hope of trying yet again to calm the PIJ down and garner international support as well as deploy Iron Dome batteries throughout the country. The plan was already complete by that evening. In the end, it was postponed. The IDF wanted to carry it out on Saturday, but the Shin Bet pressed to launch it on Friday, so the chance wouldn't be missed and Israel wouldn't be surprised by any terrorist attack.
On Friday morning, Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Kochavi came to the Southern Command for final approval of the plans. The H-hour was set for 4 p.m. in the afternoon, a "sleepy hour," or as Toledano defined it in a closed conversation: "when people are snacking on nuts and dozing."
The operation itself was executed simultaneously by the Shin Bet Operations Divisions' war room and the IAF's secret headquarters. N., who commanded intelligence, re-confirmed that all the information was current and solid: that Jabari was indeed in the apartment, and that there was no danger of wounding others. After final confirmation was received, the baton was passed to IAF commander Maj. Gen. Tomer Bar, who controlled the attack from the Kirya IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv. At 4:14 p.m. the bombs were dropped, and Operation Breaking Dawn was launched.
From the outset, Mansour was also targeted, but intelligence and operational conditions were insufficient to allow him to be targeted at the beginning. A day later it became possible, again, under the leadership of the Shin Bet Operations Division, in cooperation with the Southern Command, the IAF and the Military Intelligence Directorate (especially Unit 8200, which established a joint sub-unit with the Shin Bet to handle operational intelligence cooperation), the Shin Bet managed to close in on him in the house where he was hiding in the Rafah refugee camp.
Here too, the challenge was not only to pinpoint the location, but also to map his surroundings and to ensure that killing him would not cause massive damage that might create complications for Israel. It was therefore necessary to learn not only where he was hiding, but also what the house was constructed of, so that the IAF would know which method of attack was best suited for this operation, and who the neighbors were: which family lived in each building, and how many people were in each apartment.
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There is no country or army in the world that would undertake all these actions. The Americans would drop a few tons of bombs without blinking, even if all the residents in the nearby buildings were killed; the Russians would demolish the entire neighborhood to ensure the operative's death. Israel operates surgically. There are many reasons and advantages for avoiding unnecessary harm – from reducing the risk of escalation (it is doubtful Hamas would have continued to stand by if bodies of civilians had piled up in Gaza), to rebuffing international criticism, to the ability to look at ourselves in the mirror and say we've done everything possible to avoid harming innocent civilians.
The challenge in eliminating Mansour was threefold: to know for sure that he was in the building and exactly where; to know who was with him; and to know who was in the surrounding area so they would not be harmed. After the picture was in place, the process was repeated: N. led the operation on the Shin Bet side, and Bar for the IAF. This time, the IAF employed a different method, and used three bombs with warheads that would guarantee a hit to ensure that Mansour was killed. The first bomb struck the first floor of the building, the second hit the second floor, and the third the third floor. Mansour was killed immediately; the residents of the nearby buildings were not harmed at all.
While Israel was trying to verify that Mansour had indeed been killed, the media began to make noise about the death of seven civilians, including five children, in the Jabaliya refugee camp. The Palestinians were quick to accuse Israel of attacking and killing innocent people and for a moment, it seemed that the success of the operation had been overshadowed. Toledano rushed to the Command Center, trying to clarify what happened. Within minutes, he ruled out the possibility that the IDF had attacked Jabaliya at or around that time and shortly afterward it was already possible to determine with certainty that a PIJ rocket had fallen in the Gaza Strip and killed the civilians. This information changed the situation once again: now the PIJ was presented as the one responsible for the deaths of the Gaza residents. The civilian anger that mounted in the Gaza Strip helped Hamas and Egypt pressure the PIJ to agree to a cease-fire.
Gaza is still here
The operation in Gaza was highly successful. This was especially substantial after a series of wars and operations since the 2006 Second Lebanon War in which Israel ended its campaigns in painful draws. True, the current opponent was the weakest in the region, making the battle a bout between a heavyweight and a featherweight, but for the first time in a long time, there is no doubt who won and who lost. This result resonates not only in Gaza, but throughout the region.
There are quite a few lessons to be learned from this short operation in the Gaza Strip, with the understanding that it was a lavish strategic attack and much more complicated to reproduce against Hamas (and certainly against Hezbollah). But we also need to highlight the positive aspects: the conduct of the senior political and security level, and the cooperation between them, was efficient and void of ego and struggles. The inter-organizational cooperation was exceptional, and so were the results. Also, synchronization between all systems – intelligence, operational, economic, international and public information – was successful, and it was possible to achieve all operational objectives: a short and focused military campaign against the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, without Hamas interfering and with minimal harm to innocent civilians and minor damage.
The other side also has quite a few lessons to learn. This is the fourth time in the last 20 years that a terrorist organization has regretted starting a military campaign. After the Second Lebanon War, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said explicitly that if he had known what the results would be, he would not have initiated the kidnapping of IDF reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. Hamas deeply regretted kidnapping and killing three teens, which led to Operation Protective Edge in 2014, and regretted it once again last year when five rockets it fired at Jerusalem led to Operation Guardian of the Walls. There is no doubt that now the PIJ also regrets having initiated the latest escalation.
But the successful completion of this operation does not exempt Israel from a broader perspective, because after all, Gaza remains Gaza – with all its problems and challenges. Responsible political leaders are expected to hold strategic discussions and honestly ask themselves what they want to achieve in Gaza; not tomorrow morning, but in 10-20 years. As long as this discussion is not held, Israel will continue to maintain a fragmented foothold in Gaza – a sure recipe for the next military campaign.
