Briefing by
Colonel Miri Eisin, IDF Intelligence Officer
Jerusalem Media Center
April 23, 2002
What I'd like to do today is to give a brief overview, reminding you
what our operation was for, what we feel at this stage that we have
achieved, and also some of the things that we haven't achieved. The
operation's aim and missions were not limited, however, there are
limitations to what you can do with military means. I'd like to talk
about terrorism and the four legs it stands upon, and what we
achieved regarding each of those legs. I'm going to speak mainly from
the perspective of intelligence.
The first leg is ideology. Ideology comes from the top. Besides
ideology, you have to have people, both planners and executors, and
weapons and bombs. All three of these, ideology maybe less but
certainly people and weapons, cost money. If you don't have money,
you don't have people and weapons. If you don't have an ideology, you
don't have any of the other things. Ideology is very important
throughout.
When we talk about terrorism within the Palestinian Authority's
territories, we never said that the PA in its entirety is one big
terrorist organization. We have tried to differentiate between the
terrorists within the PA and the PA itself, but sometimes they are
interconnected - somebody who is paid by the PA during the day to be
in a security or civil function, and during his free time plans,
organizes and executes terrorist activities against Israelis.
The funding, the connections that we found, are the things that I'd
like to show you today.
We have proved the connection with the PA's own documents, found in
the compound in Ramallah and other cities. The humoristic side is,
that I read in the newspaper yesterday that the civil authorities
within the PA are complaining that they cannot take over authority
within the cities because we took away their computers and hard disks
and pieces of paper. This, in spite of the fact all along they have
been claiming that everything that we have shown is fabricated.
I'll add that I've consistently said things that I'd have to eat my
hat for as we go more thoroughly into the computers. At the beginning
I said, "no Arafat" and then we had Arafat. The documents that we
exposed until now were found inside filing cabinets. It takes a long
time to understand the information that you find, for instance, in
Marwan Barghouti's computer, or in Fuad Shubaki, the chief financial
adviser's, computer. The bottom line is money. We did not go only
into cities, we went into rural areas around the cities, and what we
focused on was terrorism: ideology, people, weapons and money. In
military terms, you have to translate that into something which you
can go and capture. And we went in and captured people, weapons,
places where they make weapons, and documents, which I will connect
afterwards to both ideology and to funding.
I'm going to talk about the people, the 4,564, let's say 4,500,
people who were detained. 1,450 people admitted to having
participated in terrorist acts against Israel. When you take into
account that we went into only six of eight cities in Judea and
Samaria, we didn't go into the Gaza strip at all, and didn't enter
many rural areas, and that 1,450 people admitted to having
participated in terrorist acts against Israelis, you realize that the
numbers are far larger than what we expected to find. I'd like to
expand on what we have done and what we haven't done. During the
operation, we managed to make the wave of terror go down drastically;
the security of the average citizen in the State of Israel was
changed over the last three weeks. There will be lingering effects
for some time in several of the cities, but we didn't capture all the
people, all the labs, all the weapons and all the connections. But we
did a lot. I am going to show both sides (waits for computer to
cooperate).
I'd like to talk about the three terrorist organizations within Judea
and Samaria. Some of the people were arrested, some people were
killed, some people are still at large. Yesterday Marwan Zaloum, a
nice man of the Fatah, ended his life in Hebron. Marwan Barghouti,
the head of the Fatah, was arrested last week.
Marwan Barghouti, to a large extent, was educated in Israeli jails.
He was imprisoned for almost four years when he was still at Bir Zeit
University, in the eighties. But I want to talk about his activities
in the last two years. He was the head of the Fatah in Judea and
Samaria. He was the head of the Tanzim. There is a difference between
having a clue about the people or intelligence ahead of time and
going into their offices and seeing how they see themselves. In every
one of the cities that we went into, Bethlehem, Jenin, Ramallah, and
in the compound which is the PA headquarters in Ramallah, we found
documents of the Fatah/Tanzim, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Three
weeks ago, when we presented the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades document
which was the first one that we had found, all the people of the PA
who were asked about it said, "what do you want, it has nothing to do
with the Fatah/Tanzim." It took us a little more time, and we found
the posters of all of the shahidim [martyrs]. Go into any Palestinian
town nowadays, take down the posters from the wall, read them in
Arabic and every single one of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade s posters
has Fatah/Tanzim and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades on them.
Marwan Barghouti, the head of the Tanzim, not only knew of terrorist
activities, he approved terrorist activities. Sometimes he dictated
the acceptance of responsibility announcements after the terrorist
activity, since everybody wants to make sure that they gain the
glory. When Marwan Barghouti dictates what is going to go out to the
press "Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is responsible, etc.", that says more
than enough about his involvement in terrorist activities. In the
year 2002, there was a definite competition between the Hamas, the
Islamic Jihad and the Fatah over violence in the Palestinian street.
At the beginning of 2002, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades was doing more
terrorist activities than Hamas and Islamic Jihad. I'm not talking
about how many were killed in the end. In the overall figures, the
Hamas definitely takes it. They have the best explosive people, they
make the most effective explosives, and they did the deadliest
attacks.
That is Fatah. Its head Marwan Barghouti was arrested and his right
hand man, his nephew, his operations officer, Ahmed Barghouti, and
the second in command, the senior activist in the northern part of
Judea and Samaria, Nasser Arwish. If I go city by city, in Ramallah,
in Tulkarm, in Bethlehem, in Nablus, in Jenin and, today I can
also say, in Hebron even though we didn't physically enter that city,
we have crippled, but haven't demolished the terrorist organizations.
There are lower people, but we have crippled the top of the Al Aqsa
Martyrs Brigades, Fatah/Tanzim in the six cities that we were inside,
and in Hebron.
When you get these pieces of paper you'll also see the names of those
we did not capture. In Kalkilya we went in and out relatively
quickly. We did not catch the two top operatives of the Al Aqsa
Martyrs Brigades and Fatah/Tanzim. In the city of Nablus, heart of
the hardcore terrorists of both Hamas and Fatah/Tanzim, they had
their own leaders there. Islamic Jihad wasn't as strong within
Nablus, but they are the ones who did the harshest suicide bombings
and other activities against us. And there are still two top
terrorists from the Fatah who, I don't know where to tell you they
are but they are not detained in the area of Nablus.
When I say crippled that means that we made a difference. Because
every one of the people who was arrested and is now talking, is
telling us about future operations that those who are still around
are planning. In that, is the possibility to stop any suicide bomber
that comes into Israel.
And that goes from the top down. As I said, Marwan Barghouti at the
top of the military terrorist pyramid. I put aside the political
issue. For me is not existent at the moment, because he himself was
the one who was planning and telling what to do. And Ahmed Barghouti
and Nasser Arwish as two top names, all of these operatives, these
terrorists are now under investigation in Israel.
When I talk about the Hamas, I'll talk about it in a different way.
The Hamas is based more in the Gaza strip. I want to remind
everybody, we didn't go into the Gaza strip. The million-odd people
within the Gaza strip, if there is one thing I can say in an extreme
manner it is that there is one thing that they are trying to do now,
execute terrorist activities against Israelis, in the Gaza strip and
especially out of the Gaza strip. They are not the only ones. In all
of the cities that we are speaking about, anybody who is left at this
stage is talking about revenge. Every operational terrorist who is
left is the seed for what will come.
We will go over the names in the Hamas and I'll talk about three
names on this list, two killed and one captured, and what it means to
us in our fight against terrorism now and against the seeds of
terrorism to come. I start from two names which are on the list in
Jenin, even though that is only because that's where they came from;
they were far beyond Jenin. I am talking about Kais Adwan, a name
that everybody knows well, who was killed by our troops in the town
of Tubas, and Said Alwad who was killed with him. When you don't have
somebody like Kais Adwan to run the scene in an area like Samaria,
what does that mean? Kais Adwan was not a suicide bomber. That wasn't
what he wanted to do. He didn't want to die. He was the one who
learned to make explosives. When they learn to make explosives,
they'd rather do it in the Gaza strip or in other places. He learned
how to make the explosives in the Gaza strip. From there he went to
Samaria. He was the main terrorist in the Samaria area, from Ramallah
north, and worked out of Jenin and Nablus. He was the man who planned
and sent suicide bombers, meaning he knew how to make the explosives.
You have to have money for that, you have to have a place to make
them. He knew how to find the operatives. You have to have education
and ideology to find people able to do that. You have to have to know
how to get into Israel proper because he was sending the suicide
bombers into Israel proper - how to get through whatever you have to
get through, bring them to the right spot, make the right effect.
Said Alwad was the person in Samaria who knew how to make Kassam 2
rockets. And the fact that he is not with us any more means that, at
the moment, there is not anybody who knows how to make Kassam 2
rockets in Samaria. The knowledge is from the Gaza strip, that is
where they make them extensively. He was the man who learned how to
make them. This is not something that you know how to make when you
wake up in the morning. A rocket is even more difficult than
explosives, and explosives are not that easy themselves, certainly
not the type of explosives that they were making. Kais Adwan and Said
Alwad were both killed in the second week.
The third person that I'd like to talk about is Salim Haja in Nablus.
Salim Haja was captured when we entered Nablus, and you have to
understand that every person that we captured, like Salim Haja, is
now telling us about the cell he was in, the people, how he planned,
what he directed. These are the things that we are starting to
learn now, which will give us more information when we do pinpointed
activities again within the cities. Because we are still at the stage
where the PA is saying it can't do anything because it doesn't have
the capability. Before, they said they couldn't do anything because
Israel bothered them, and before that they just didn't do anything.
I'll get back to ideology in a moment, ideology and education.
The different names that I mentioned now in Nablus are people that we
have arrested and people that we have killed. With the Hamas I would
say we hit a blow. Certainly on the Kassam 2 rocket issue. For us, it
was very important because they planned to use them by going into
cities on the edge of the Sharon: Tulkarm, Kalkilya, and trying to
hit an urban center within Israel, just as they fired out of the Gaza
strip as north as they could and hit Ashkelon and the city of Sderot.
They understand and their perspective is that Ashkelon and Sderot are
on the edge of Israel and don't make much of an impact. The impact
will be if they manage to do something in Kfar Saba, Raanana, which
is right in the middle, the urban center of Israel.
The last list which I have is the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. As I
said, afterwards I'll give a copy to you. It's important for me in
the sense that we did a rather thorough job as you all have been
reminding us.
I'll put in my terms, I would say that we virtually wiped out the
Islamic Jihad's heads in Jenin. When I say wiped out, it is important
to be exact. One was killed and four, including the two top ones,
surrendered in the camp of Jenin. I have spoken of both, Ali Zafouri,
Tabaat Mardawi.
Jenin sent out the most suicide bombers. Twenty-eight suicide bombers
came out of Jenin, twenty-three committed suicide. We captured ten in
the city who had already made their tape. The Islamic Jihad center in
Judea and Samaria was in Jenin. Their money came directly from
Damascus to Jenin. We had an interesting perspective through the
captured documents of seeing how funding for Islamic Jihad from
Damascus caused problems within Jenin. The Islamic Jihad had money
and could pay their terrorists and for education and weapons. The
competition between the Islamic Jihad and the Fatah/Tanzim and the El
Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Jenin was mainly over the fact that one had
money and the other didn't and 'please could you give us more money,
so we can be better competition on our terrorist activities against
Afula, Hadera and Haifa' where both the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and
the Palestinian Islamic Jihad did their acts of terror against
Israelis.
These are some perspectives on people who are captured, killed or
detained by Israel. Obviously, the people who were detained are not
exactly sitting down and saying, 'now I'll tell you absolutely
everything we can.' These things take time and patience. Some have
told us more, some have told us more quickly. I suppose in the end it
has a lot to do with the people themselves. As time goes on, we will
continue to give more briefings based on what these people now are
telling us. Of course, for us, it is basic intelligence for the
continuation of our pinpointed operations of terrorist activity
against Israel.
I'd like to talk on the last issue and that is education and
ideology. I think that the first thing we wanted to find was the
answer to the question everybody wanted to know. Did Yasser Arafat
tell somebody to do a terrorist act? How does the money go? That is
what we have been looking for. And as we went on, we understood that
the sea of documents that we have uncovered shows a side which
probably has the most far-reaching implications of the present
operation.
Every single school we went into (the schools are empty now of
course, people have not gone to school in the last three weeks), be
it in Jenin, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Kalkilya, or Tulkarm, in every one
of them, all the walls are plastered with the posters of the
glorification of the shahidim. First graders, sixth graders, eighth
graders. That is what you have in the schools. We started looking
more deeply at the schoolbooks. I recommend some of you do so. The
Canadians who fund the educational system may want to read the
educational books that are being taught in the PA. A lot of those
were printed in 1999 and in 2000. There is no recognition of the
State of Israel at all. There is no State of Israel on any map. These
are things, that when we talk about the violence of the last eighteen
months, everybody says, 'well you know,' like it is Israel's
problem.
I pose this as a question to you, because if I could go now into a
printing press, not a military place, to read the books and see what
is being taught - because in the last 24 hours four Palestinians have
been murdered and two are in critical condition, having been lynched
by Palestinians who suspected them of having cooperated with
Israelis: when we talk about what violence does, where terrorism
comes from, and the ideology which I spoke about at the beginning,
you have an ideology here that taught a generation of people that
'Violence is OK' and a sort of competition between how horrendous
Israel is and how poor the Palestinians are.
I want to propose to everyone sitting here: find an Israeli book that
teaches anything for violence or anything that we teach our soldiers
when we go into these operations, which are military operations and a
state of war, where mistakes are made and it is harsh. But what we
teach them to do, what we teach them about civilians, and the fact
that we put people on trial for doing things which are wrong, as
opposed to four Palestinians who I have no idea who they are and it
doesn't matter to me. It doesn't matter to me if they were with the
Israelis or not with the Israelis. They were put on violent trial in
the middle of the streets of Hebron and Ramallah. And there is a
direct line to ideology, and education, and listening to
Palestinian TV, Abu Dhabi TV, Al Jazeera TV and to what they say in Arabic
to their own people. Because what Saeb Erekat says in English, "2,000
people killed in Jenin", or Yasser Arafat, "500 people massacred in
Jenin" is quoted all over the world in English. What he says in
Arabic on the televisions that they watch, "I want to be a shahid,
you should all be shahidim, that's OK".
So you have ideology, you have education that violence is the only
solution. The fact that it has already spread all over the world,
from anti-Zionist to anti-Semitic, is something that I leave to my
colleagues, not to myself in military terms. As a civil person in
Israel, aside from being a military person, all I can say is that to
me the most horrific of what we have seen and been exposed to in the
last three weeks is the depth of hatred and the education to
violence, which has nothing to do with occupation. It has everything
to do with what you say. Because if you don't recognize the State of
Israel in any case, then the seeds of violence are very easy. And in
that sense just go and find out what they teach in the schools and
what they were teaching in 1999. Because one of our problems is
understanding that these books are from then, when we were on a peace
wave. It is not something that can be contended with.
We have a few books that we'll show you, afterwards, examples of what
we found in the Ramallah compound, in the office of the personal
bodyguard of Arafat, a book in Arabic called 'Nazo-Zionism'. It was
printed at the end of 2001 in Bethlehem and besides saying that there
was no Holocaust, it has every possible anti-Semitic horrific thing
that you can think of from the last 100 years. It is a book that was
printed in the PA, sent to their office and we found it on the
shelves there. We've already talked about other types of incitement
that we've seen.
I want to finish with what I began with. Terrorism has four legs:
ideology, people, weapons and bombs, and money. I'll talk about
weapons for just one more word. In Nablus we found 18 labs for making
explosives. You find one, you find two, you find three. Every single
one of these labs was inside a civilian building, including one in
the basement of an official PA building. They were exploded because
TATP is the sort of thing that if you walk in and just blow on it, it
could explode. You don't take a chance with TATP. In Nablus alone (I
have the most exact data from there), we found 24 belts as in "find a
person, put the explosives on, send them out". Twenty four belts.
Besides ideology, people and weapons, I spoke about money. On this
I say, just as a teaser, we are working on that one. We've been
finding more and more documents. For us it is one of the most
important issues to explain to our European friends, to those who are
funding the PA, that we aren't against the civil side, but we think
the money is not going for the causes that they think it is going to.
We are trying as much as possible to find out from the documents,
because we understand how important it is to be able to prove what we
have been saying for a very long time.
That is the briefing, now it is open for questions.
Q: Do you have the bureaucratic means to stop the flow of money, for
example, from Damascus, and all this explosive stuff, are they
creating it themselves or is it bought?
A: 95% of it is created by themselves, that's what we keep calling
the explosive labs. It is made of ingredients which any chemical lab
can make and I differentiate between explosive labs and chemical
labs. We discovered that in the Bethlehem University, they were
making the chemical components, which are the ones with which you
make the explosives. I said that's the sort of thing that you don't
think of looking at in the beginning. You don't think of going into
the university and looking within the university for the ingredients
of the chemicals that make the explosives for the suicide bombers and
different types of charges that they were putting against us. That is
95%. The 5% that we call "standard explosives" is either smuggled in
from different areas (as you know, we had smuggling from Jordan,
although Jordan does try to stop it as much as possible) and as you
know, Judea and Samaria is not a hermetically sealed area and they
steal things from military installations. It is one of our consistent
problems. We have tried to raise the security of all our bases to
make sure this doesn't happen, but that's where they get the standard
explosives.
Q: How do you trace a deposit from Damascus to the Palestinian
Authority?
A: The Palestinian Authority has its own international telephone
code; it is different than the State of Israel. The Palestinian
Authority is the civil authority there, the banks are working, the
supermarkets are open, I'm not saying it is the best environment at
the moment, but it is all there. And the transfers of money can come
either by courier in cash, or they can come through bank transfers.
You can't stop that, it's like asking to stop an Internet transaction
that we all do nowadays in day to day life, that's the modern world
we live in. So we may be aware of it, in intelligence terms, but we
couldn't talk about it over the last year. And here we have been
finding the documents to support it, because the fact that you're
aware of something, doesn't mean that you have the proof that you can
bring out. We know about the funding from Damascus directly to Jenin
from interrogations, money transactions and the general intelligence
of the PA, their own reports. One of the reports from Jenin describes
how $135,000 were transferred and "we wanted to get a cut", and this
is from the GI of the Palestinian Authority. "We didn't get our cut."
And the whole discussion is because they didn't get a cut of the
money. These are things that we have talked about extensively over
the last four years, this isn't something new.
Q: How much money, according to your knowledge, was spent on
so-called terrorist activities?
A: It is a question that I'll think that I'll try now. It is an
interesting perspective. In intelligence obviously we're working for
the government of the State of Israel, or intelligence for the
IDF. Now, we have been trying to look at things that were not usually
our regular questions. This is a question that I will try to answer.
I don't know how much explosives cost but, for example, one of those
documents that we showed you said how much it cost them. How much the
explosives cost, and the lab itself, it wasn't something that we had
thought about before.
Q: You mentioned that you have roughly 1,450 arrested who have
already acknowledged having planned or participated in attacks
against Israel. These people are sworn to harm or invalidate the
State of Israel. I'm curious to know how and why they are telling you
these things?
A: That's a question you might want to pose to someone else. I'm not
in the interrogation rooms. That's something you could ask the United
States - why the people who have been arrested in the United States
have admitted to what they admitted. I think the idea is that you do
it in the legal means that you can.
Q: Can you tell us if you've gotten anything interesting from Mr.
Barghouti?
A: As Mr. Barghouti at the moment is still at the stage of
international exposure together with legal arraignment, I will leave
that on the side at the moment. I know that we all heard when he was
arraigned yesterday, he said that he is a political figure and not a
military figure. I can say in military terms that not only is there
no question about a lot of documents that you, yourselves, have
already seen, there is also no question about the direct connection
of Marwan Barghouti to the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. When they
write him, he adds on to it his own addition to Yasser Arafat, just for
an example. I think that we have more than enough additional material
which shows him as a terrorist and not as a political figure.
Q: Anything useful coming from his interrogation?
A: I don't know.
Q: [asks for information about the lynchings of Palestinians]
A: The last two days - there was one today and one yesterday.
Yesterday in Ramallah, a group of people that were headed by the
Fatah/Tanzim, as I said not everybody was arrested, but local low
people accused three people of having cooperated with Israel on
arresting Marwan Barghouti, and a crowd of people in the street
killed one of them in the street, and critically injured two others.
Today in Hebron, the Fatah/Tanzim on the street accused three people
of having pinpointed Marwan Zaloum, the man who was killed yesterday
and who was the head of Fatah/Tanzim in Hebron. I'm going to open
parenthesis for a moment, and say that Marwan Zaloum was personably
responsible for sending the woman suicide bomber last (a tiny little
piece of recording of one or two words is missing here) here in
Jerusalem, I think it is at about 150 meters from where we are
right now. He was personally responsible for that, for sending a woman
suicide bomber. The lynch itself - they were accused, in the street,
all three of them were shot in the head and then mutilated. These are
the last two days; yes, there are more instances.
I'll say one thing
for the PA and their security functionaries. Throughout the last
nineteen months of violence, when they were consistently arresting
people and letting them go, arresting people and letting them go, the
ones who were accused of betraying the PA and cooperating with the
Israelis were never let out of jail. They were accused, they were
found and put on trial and they were kept in jail until the end. And
I'm not saying this to be ironic whatsoever. It's a fact. Those
killed in the two lynchings from today and yesterday were not in
jail. They were accused on the street, and lynched by a mob. I don't
want to give you an exact date on that, and I know of at least three
other cases, not of lynches. Lynches are the sort of thing that we
hear about more, but of mobs hitting and hurting people. But when I
say I remember that, I didn't come prepared to give that exact data,
and I will go and look it up.
Q: How effective do you think the operation has been in terms of
capturing and please give us a general overview?
A: In this operation, it is very difficult to differentiate between
the Hamas, the PIJ and the Fatah/Tanzim in the different cities
because of the fact that the PA, from the beginning of 2002, let all
hell loose. And it was a question of who could do more. It wasn't
only that the security functionaries unleashed [the terrorists], they
said: "go for it, violence is the way. Terrorism will bring it." Of
course, they don't call it terrorism. If I hear the Hamas spokesman
from Lebanon again explaining that it all has to do with occupation
and then go to Saeb Erekat who says it all has to do with occupation,
then I will say, as I have said at every single place possible,
"education to hatred has nothing to do with occupation."
But I'd say that we demolished essentially 70-80% within the cities
that we entered, as a ballpark figure, because the extent that we
found was much more extensive than we expected, so it made us
question our basic assessment of how widespread the knowledge and
will to make explosives was. Weapons are a different issue. Here we
are all aware of the weapons problem. There are 14,400 Kalachnikov
rifles alone in Judea and Samaria as part of the Oslo agreement for
the policemen and the different security functions. During our
operation, we found a little over 4,000. There was always this
question. It is obvious that the PA will say that this is what is
going to be used now for security within the cities. I'll remind you
that in Ramallah, as part of the issue of the people who were under
siege inside Jibril Rajoub's headquarters, one of the issues was the
weapons of the people of the preventive security within the
structure, with attention to the fact that we realize that afterwards
somebody is going to have to do security within these areas. But that
means that there are more or less 10,000 rifles still out there. In
that sense, there are lots of weapons still out there.
I was in a warehouse this morning of what I call improvised weapons,
home-made weapons. Not the ones that are part of the Oslo agreement,
the ones that they have been making. The explosives are one side of
it but on the other side of it are the weapons. There was a table the
size of the table here filled with them, you looked and couldn't
believe it. Just take a bit of iron, a pipe, just imagine - all the
sewage pipes throughout Judea and Samaria, and I imagine there are
a lot, you know, you build buildings, you have pipes, you have
sewage, and that's what they were making, improvised weapons all of
it.
Obviously, these are not being used as part of the different PA
security functionaries. These are things that were made to kill
Israelis. So I'll go back to where I started and say 70-80% of the
explosives. This is an estimate based on the fact that there was a
lot more than we expected to find. That is our best estimate,
cleaning out mainly Jenin and Nablus but not being as thorough in
Tulkarm, Kalkilya, Ramallah or Bethlehem.
We arrested around 70% of the top. I want to remind you that there
are two levels: those who plan and execute, request money, find
people, make explosives, and all the others who are couriers and
different types; they are all part of the terrorist organization. We
arrested around 70% of the top operatives. What that means right now
is that they don't have their directors. We arrested them within the
1,450 who said they participated in terrorist activities. That means
we arrested a large amount, again, within our estimates. This number
is huge, everybody takes it for granted, but it is not for granted
at all. It is a huge number. Take it in proportion to the
Palestinian population, and the number of people who are
participating in terrorist acts is inconceivable. I'm not talking
about regular PA policemen. They were detained and let go. I'm
talking about those who have admitted to participating in terrorist
activities against Israelis. Not every person who is around is
that.
Q: Have you found documents so far linking contributions from, say,
the US to terrorist activity?
A: No. Not as yet. That is not exactly the sort of thing that was in
the files we first went into, intelligence type files. The amount of
documents is truly huge. These are things that we are starting to
look for just now. Just the computers is a whole world unto itself
that we are just beginning to try to understand how to check.
Q: I heard a figure today that says that since the beginning of the
operation, there were over 250 terror incidents in and from the Gaza
strip. How would you assess the situation there? Is the situation
about to blow up in the Gaza strip?
A: When you say blow up, I'll try to pose it in a different way.
Every single terrorist within the Gaza strip is trying to execute a
terrorist activity of some sort, on whatever level he can, against
any Israeli target, be it in the Gaza strip and especially out of the
Gaza strip. The Gaza strip is physically and topographically very
different from Judea and Samaria. At the moment, it's contained. As
you all know, Israeli soldiers and civilians were killed in the Gaza
strip in the last three weeks and I would say it's a boiling pot of
poison. I get back to my point of ideology and education and hatred,
that's what they know. What they are being told, what they hear is
revenge and hatred and it's poison. And that is what they know how
to do. And it is not just the terrorist organizations.
Q: Do you know what is happening in Bethlehem?
A: The negotiations in Bethlehem are continuing as we speak.
Q: Is it true that the Israelis filmed the fighting in Jenin and will
you present it?
A: The film? We have never hid the fact that we use different
capabilities from the air. Not to film our forces, they are to open
up areas and pinpoint where the enemy is. These are things that we
have on hand. All the information within the IDF for the Jenin
committee is being prepared. As you know, committee within the IDF
has been appointed to prepare all of the information for the UN. We
are being guided by the Minister of Defense, who is leading the
entire issue.
Q: You singled out Canadians, can you enlarge on this?
A: Just because it was posed to me that it was the Canadians who
funded education in the PA. The Canadians, as part the international
effort with other European countries, the European Union, etc., the
Saudi Arabians for the Arab world, specifically funded the education
within the PA. They actually sent somebody a couple of years ago and
checked the textbooks. We found the textbooks themselves, and were
appalled by what we saw there. I'm talking about day schools, we
haven't yet checked up on high schools. They show maps of the Middle
East without Israel, which I suppose everyone takes as a given but I,
as an Israeli, find that appalling. The shahidim are presented for
the kids everywhere. Anybody who went into Jenin and the camp saw
these pictures absolutely everywhere. I actually have one I my bag. I
keep some of them, especially the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades posters,
because Fatah/Tanzim and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades appear on all
the posters of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades because they are part of
the Fatah/Tanzim. But that is something that we're working on now and
we will give you more details along the way.
Q: You say the Canadian government funds this?
A: Some of it is donations but most of it is completely official.
They fund the salaries of elementary teachers.
Q: And tell us about the schools again.
A: I've seen pictures with my own eyes of the schools that we
entered. I was only in one school myself. It was a day school meaning
until sixth grade. The schools separate boys and girls, they're not
combined. Lots of times, it is one structure that is divided into two
areas. In both the girls and the boys in both types of schools, on
all of the walls are pictures of the shahidim, and the textbooks, as
I said, are the official PA textbooks. One example: just open it up
and the first thing that you see is a map. You see that there is
Filastin [Palestine], there is no Israel. By the way, Filastin
includes Jordan.
Q: Are the shahids glorified in the textbooks?
A: The shahidim are newer [the books were printed in 1999] and we're
looking into textbooks more and more now. When I opened it up and
went through, the first thing you see is the map. I've been in
intelligence for 15 years, and in the nineties, we and all the Arab
countries spoke peace. There was one stage along the way when we were
talking about the change that we saw in their education. They were
starting to talk on their radio and television, in their words,
instead of violence and similar words, they were talking about the
strength of peace, using the same adjectives but in a different
context. What we're seeing here is an education to deep hatred, which
has violence as an integral part. In the textbooks themselves, we
have not yet gotten to that stage, but that is what we're working on
now. I'm doing this now, basically fulltime, working on these
different things. It takes a little bit of time to read them and
translate them and bring them out, and we will do so.
Q: Can you tell us anything about what is going on in Bethlehem? What
is the situation in the church?
A: They're hungry, they're thirsty, they're dirty, they're unhappy,
hopefully it will end soon.