Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [247]
Massive Israeli resources were put into killing Ayyash, who continued with a campaign of suicide bombings that reduced going out to a form of Russian roulette for many urban Israelis. Two senior Izzedine al-Qassam leaders were killed when an apartment blew up in Gaza, and another senior figure was snatched off a Nablus street after he failed to notice two sweaty Sudanese day labourers loitering outside a mosque who were Ethiopian Falasha Shin Beth agents. Islamic Jihad’s leader, Fathi Shiqaqi, was assassinated by a Mossad team on Malta. So self-confident was Mossad that, as the killer sped off on a motorbike and caught a boat to Sicily, his colleagues hung around disguised as bystanders to give Maltese police hopelessly inaccurate descriptions. Ayyash’s weakness was his family—his wife and son in Gaza, whom he regularly visited, while keeping in touch with his mother and father by mobile phone. Shin Beth stepped up pressure on his mother, with raids on the family home, and prolonged ten-hour bouts of interrogation, designed to infuriate her son. Ayyash was also too comfortable in his routines and grew sloppy.
He accepted the offer of a safe house from a Hamas member in Gaza, unaware that the man’s businessman uncle, who owned the building, was on Shin Beth’s payroll. Ayyash enjoyed the joke that his apartment was a thousand yards from a major Israeli police checkpoint. Unknown to him this was where his destiny was being settled. He had also discovered mobile phones as an alternative to erratic and easily monitored landlines. He changed them every few weeks, but not before having long calls with his mother and father. On 25 December 1995 Ayyash proudly announced that his wife had borne a second son, rashly telling his father they would speak again on 5 January. In the interim, Shin Beth technicians adapted a mobile phone, inserting fifty grams of RDX high explosive beneath the battery, and a minute detonator that could be remotely triggered. The phone still weighed the same and functioned normally. The phone was passed to his landlord’s nephew who said Ayyash could use it any time he liked. The landline in his apartment began to play up. Ayyash told his father that this mobile number, 050-507-497, was his preferred number. Freshly returned home at 4.30 a.m. after a night’s mystery activities, Ayyash removed his female clothes and settled down for a few hours’ sleep in his purple boxer shorts. The mobile rang at 8.40 a.m.; it was his father. After exchanging a few words, the father found the line disconnected. High in the sky above Gaza, an Israeli agent in a spotter plane had detonated the shaped charge in the phone that took half of Ayyash’s head off. A hundred thousand gun-toting Palestinians attended his funeral, straining for a last touch of his coffin. His landlord’s uncle was slipped away by Mossad to a new life in the US. An Israeli demolition team erased Ayyash’s family home in Riffat. Within four days of Ayyash’s death, Hamas suicide bombers killed fifty-seven people in an orgy of attacks that by May 1996 felled the government of Shimon Peres. His tough Likudnik successor, Netanyahu, decided to strike at Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas in otherwise friendly Jordan. In October 1997 two Mossad agents posing as Canadians waylaid Mashaal in his Amman offices, spraying a lethal synthetic opiate into his ear. This was designed to kill him, painfully, forty-eight hours later. Both agents were caught by the Jordanians, who were outraged by this botched violation