Preceded by the cry of: Never, Never, Never, Never, Never,
_-- And Beckett's hapless figure of Not I.
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Robert Fisk: Death by Remote Control as Hit Squads Return

The Guardian, April 13, 2001

When the Israelis came for Abu Jihad exactly 13 years ago, they employed
up to 4,000 men for his assassination. There was an Awacs plane over
Tunis, a squadron of jets to protect the Awacs, two warships in the
Mediterranean, a submarine to guard the warships, a 707 refuelling
aircraft, 40 men to go ashore and surround the home of Yasser Arafat's PLO
deputy commander, and four men and an officer to murder their victim.

Abu Jihad's son Jihad al-Wazzir recalls: "First they killed the bodyguard
who was asleep in the car outside. Then they killed the gardener and the
second bodyguard ... My dad was writing in his office and went into the
hall with a pistol. He got off one shot before he was hit. My mother
remembers how each of the four men would step forward and empty an entire
clip of bullets from an automatic weapon into my dad like it was a kind
of ritual. Then an officer in a black mask stepped forward and shot him in
the head, just to make sure."

Today, Israel's murder squads come cheaper: a computer chip that activates
a bomb in a mobile telephone, a family collaborator, or even a splash of
ultra-violet paint on the roof of a car to alert an Israeli Apache
helicopter pilot to fire a Hellfire missile into the Palestinian's
vehicle.

It's long-range assassination. But some things don't change. Palestinians
have long believed and Jihad al-Wazzir Jnr is convinced that the
Israeli who delivered the coup de grace to his father on 16 April 1988 was
an intelligence officer called Moshe Yalon. And today, one of the
principal instigators behind the policy of murdering Israel's Palestinian
military opponents is the deputy chief of staff, a certain major general
called Moshe Yalon.

It's a cruel, vicious, internationally illegal war in which the
Palestinians have themselves been guilty in the past. Back in the
Seventies, Israeli and PLO agents murdered each other in Europe in a
policy of retaliation and counter-retaliation that drove European security
forces insane with anger. "In the end, these murders led to a ceasefire,"
Mr al-Wazzir explains. "The whole thing ended."

It continued, however, in Beirut where two of the men involved in
murdering PLO leaders were called Ehud Barak and Amnon Shahak. Shahak
would later become the Israeli military commander in Lebanon in 1982. And
it was Mr Barak who as Prime Minister last year relaunched Israel's murder
squads.

Historians will one day debate the worth of such killings. Hamas and
Islamic Jihad, after all, have their own murderers though their suicide
bombs slaughter civilians as well as soldiers, hitherto unknown victims
rather than individual Israeli intelligence officers.

But Israel's killers take innocent lives too. An Apache helicopter attack
on a Palestinian militant tore two middle-aged Palestinian women to
pieces; the Israelis did not apologise. The nephew of a man murdered by
the Israelis in Nablus later admitted to the Palestinian Authority that he
had given his uncle's location to the Israelis. He told his interrogators:
"They said they were only going to arrest him. Then they killed him."

If it's a dirty war which it is it's also a developing one. Mr
al-Wazzir, now an economic analyst in Gaza, explains: "It's small-scale
now and in known locations. People who did not think of themselves as
targets are killed. There's a network of Israeli army intelligence and air
force intelligence, and Mossad and Shin Bet that works together, feeding
each other information.

"They can cross the lines between Area C [under Israeli control] and Area
B [shared control] in the occupied territories. They can penetrate these
borders. Usually, they carry out operations when the IDF [Israeli Defence
Force] morale is low. When they killed my father, the IDF was in very low
spirits because of the first intifada. So they go for a 'spectacular' to
show what great warriors they are. Now the IDF morale is low again because
of the second intifada."

Palestinian security officers in Gaza have been intrigued at the logic
behind the Israeli killings. One of the Palestinian officials says:"Our
guys meet their guys and we know their officers and operatives. I tell you
this frankly they are as corrupt and indisciplined as we are. And as
ruthless.

"After they [the Israelis] targeted Mohamed Dahlan's convoy when he was
coming back from security talks, Dahlan [the head of Palestinian
'preventive security' in Gaza] talked to [the Israeli Foreign Minister
Shimon] Peres. 'Look what you guys are doing to us,' Dahlan told Peres.
'Don't you realise it was me who took Sharon's son to meet Arafat?'"

Was this a threat? Mr al-Wazzir understands some of the death squad logic.
"It has some effect because we Palestinians are a paternalistic society,"
he says. "We believe in the idea of a father figure. But when they
assassinated my dad, the intifada didn't stop. It was affected but all the
political objectives failed; rather than demoralising the Palestinians,
the assassination fuelled the intifada.

"They say there's a list now of 100 Palestinians on the murder list. No, I
don't think the Palestinians will adopt the same type of killings against
Israeli intelligence. An army is an institution, a system. Murdering an
officer just results in him being replaced."

The Israelis have murdered up to 20 Palestinians they claim to be
"terrorists" with no concrete evidence and no court hearings. It's a
practice they honed in Lebanon where guerrilla leaders were blown up by
hidden bombs or shot in the back by Shin Bet execution squads, often as
in the case of an Amal leader in the village of Bidias after
interrogation. All this was, and still is, in the name of "security". And
that is something the murders have clearly not produced.

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