How Israel killed most wanted terrorist with a phone call in 1996

On October 19, 1994, a red-and-white bus on Tel Aviv’s Route No. 5 approached a stop on Dizengoff Street, which even then was known for its cafes, bars and shopping. In one of its aisle seats on the left side sat a slim, fair-skinned and round-faced man named Saleh Abdel Rahim al-Souwi. “He looked harmless, but behind his placid manner lay rage and a thirst for revenge,” writes Samuel M Katz in his 1999 book The Hunt for the Engineer. Israeli forces had killed Saleh’s younger brother Hasin in 1989.At 8.56am, Saleh rose from his seat without picking his brown bag off the floor. Instead, he flipped a switch inside his jacket pocket. A wire ran from the jacket to the bag through his trousers and connected with 20kg of TNT squeezed inside a landmine with plenty of nails and screws.The blast that followed blew the bus “off its chassis like a toy...melted most of the fibreglass frame...leaving behind only a metallic skeleton...bodies were torn to shreds and thrown through melted windows onto the street below and rooftops nearby”.A piece of the No. 5 bus got stuck in overhead cables 20 feet above and remained there all morning, The New York Times reported next day. The blast “blew the windows out of another bus passing from the opposite direction, crushed a nearby car and shattered windows all along the street. There were casualties on both buses and on the street, where passersby were knocked down by the force of the explosion,” it said. medium113513049It wasn’t his planIn one instant, 21 people had been killed and 50 severely wounded. It was the deadliest terrorist bombing Israel had seen until then. Saleh, who had steeled himself for the act over several days by reciting, “Think not of those who are slain in Allah’s way as dead”, had not flinched while executing the plan, but it wasn’t his plan.The mastermind was a 28-year-old Palestinian man named Yehiya (or Yahya) Abdal-Tif-Ayyash. The English-speaking world found it easier to call him ‘The Engineer’.Between his first major strike on April 6, 1994 — seven gas cylinders, five grenades and 1,100 carpenter nails squeezed inside the boot of a 1987 Opel Ascona, and exploded in front of a bus packed with high school boys in the town of Afula — and his own killing in January 1996, Yehiya played a role in the deaths of around 150 Israelis and the wounding of about 500 others, becoming the “most notorious freedom fighter in the history of the Palestinian liberation movement”. For years after Yehiya’s killing, young men in Gaza used to wear t-shirts emblazoned with his face, and just a couple of years ago Hamas named its longest-range rocket ‘Ayyash 250’. But none of that was part of Yehiya’s original plan.Wanted to be an engineerKatz says Yehiya was born in a farming family living in Rafat, in February 1966. He was a brilliant student and finished school with 92.8% marks in 1985. In his village, he was known as the boy who could fix old radios and TVs, and unsurprisingly, he chose to study electrical engineering at the Birzeit University in Ramallah.When he finished his BSc honours in engineering in 1991, Yehiya wanted to travel abroad for his master’s, and eventually get a job in Jordan or one of the Gulf states. But the Israeli authorities turned down his application for permission to go abroad although he had never been arrested and his family record was clean.That denial embittered Yehiya and he was sucked into the world of Hamas. In Katz’s words: “that rubber stamp could have altered the course of Middle Eastern politics forever”.Wanted, dead or aliveBut the Israelis had made an enemy, a young, energetic and resourceful man. And through his chosen suicide bombers, this man had shed rivers of blood. There was no turning back after that. Shin Bet, Israel’s counter-terrorist and counter-espionage intelligence agency, cast its net for Yehiya soon after the April ’94 Afula car bomb explosion that killed nine people and wounded 55 others. On July 11, 1994, Shin Bet cornered Yehiya’s friend and deputy, 30-year-old Ali Osman Mohammed Atssi. They wanted to take him alive to reach Yehiya, but Ali resisted and died in a “hail of gunfire”. The second most wanted Hamas man had been eliminated, the first — Yehiya — would play cat-and-mouse for another 18 months.A family manThe kill order for Yehiya came from the top. Katz says in his book that the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth of October 23, 1994, quoted an aide of then PM Yitzhak Rabin as saying: “Yehiya Ayyash, the mastermind behind the murderous attack on Dizengoff, is considered a dead man. It’s only a matter of time before we get our hands on him.”But days turned into weeks, and weeks into months. Often, Israeli commandos missed Yehiya by a few minutes. One officer told Katz: “On more than one occasion we had burst through a front door only to find the mattress on the floor soaking with sweat.”But Yehiya had a weakness: his family. He was advised to escape to Iran, Syria or Sudan, but refused. He took “enormous risks” to visit his parents and wife in Rafat, sometimes coming in the guise of an old Arab woman, or as an “Orthodox Jewish settler or even an Israeli Army reservist”. And in a major embarrassment for Shin Bet, it became known in June 1995 that Yehiya’s wife was pregnant with his second child. 113513764A fatal mistakeBy late 1995, it was clear that Yehiya was hiding in Gaza, an area governed by the Palestinians. But the Palestinians were poor and could be expected to give him up for the right price. Besides, after living a fugitive’s life for three years, Yehiya was showing signs of fatigue and carelessness. “He stopped sleeping in a different bed every night. He began to trust confidants and school chums,” writes Katz. As 1995 wound down, Yehiya gave the Israelis the opportunity they needed.While living in Gaza, Yehiya had met Osama Hamad, a Hamas operative who had been his friend at Birzeit University. Osama offered Yehiya accommodation at one of his uncle’s houses on Shaheed al-Khaluti Street, and Yehiya accepted. He moved into the house under the name Abdullah Abu Ahmed and started using Osama’s cell phone to keep in touch with his parents in Rafat (his heavily pregnant wife and son were moved to Gaza later that year).What Yehiya, and maybe even Osama, didn’t know was that Osama’s uncle Kamal Hamad, a wealthy real estate broker and car salesman in Gaza, had been a Shin Bet informer “for nearly 20 years”. The father of 18 had grown wealthy with Israeli help, and would now pay them back with Yehiya’s head.Call him, kill himTo catch or kill Yehiya inside Palestinian territory, the Israelis only needed access to his cell phone. If he carried it around with him, they could track his location. If he left it at home, they could plant a tiny explosive inside it, and trigger the charge when they were sure Yehiya was using it.Yehiya had made a long call to his parents on December 25, 1995 to talk about his newborn child. Before hanging up, he had fixed January 5 for his next call. The Israelis had their date, all they needed was the phone.Kamal had gifted the Motorola Alpha phone with the number 050-507497 to Osama about four months earlier. The New York Times of January 10, 1996, said Kamal sometimes “borrowed” this phone from his nephew. The Independent of January 9 said Kamal had “asked his nephew for the phone, which he later returned” on the previous Thursday – January 4, 1996. “It was almost certainly at this moment that the 2oz (57 grams) radio-controlled bomb was inserted,” The Independent added. What happened after that is history. This is what Osama told The Independent’s Patrick Cockburn:“At 9am the cellular phone rang. It was Yahya’s father, who asked to speak to him. I handed him the phone and heard him ask how his father was. I left the room to leave him alone. Five minutes later I returned because I thought he had finished his conversation. I saw Yahya lying on the ground covered in blood. He had no head.”The New York Times gave some more details. It said Yehiya’s father had tried calling on the landline first, “but could not get through: apparently the attackers had blocked the normal phone line to the house”. Then he dialled Osama’s cell phone. This is what the NYT’s Joel Greenberg wrote:“I told him that we don’t want to talk on this telephone,” the father recalled, referring to fears of surveillance by the Israelis. “But he said we could talk. When I told him, ‘No,’ again, he asked, ‘How are you?’” Then the phone exploded.How did the Shin Bet know when Osama had passed the phone to Yehiya? Greenberg reported a plane had been heard hovering over the neighbourhood. “Israeli press and television reports said that the phone-bomb was detonated by a radio signal from the plane. The signal was sent after Mr Ayyash was identified as the man speaking on the cellular phone.”Leaf out of old bookWhen thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah operatives exploded across Lebanon on September 17, 2024, it seemed like Israel had inflicted cutting-edge punishment on its foes, but Yehiya Ayyash’s story shows they’ve been here before. The question is, what happens now? On February 26, 1996, a suicide bomber blew up a bus on Jerusalem’s Route No. 18, killing 25 persons and seriously wounding 80. Exactly one week later, another No. 18 bus was blown up. Nineteen people were killed and more than 20 seriously injured. It was Hamas’ revenge for Yehiya’s killing.It’s 2024 and Hezbollah has been hit hard. Will it let this humiliation pass quietly?