regularly dubbing somebody else as head of Hamas’ military wing in the West Bank. The particular individual’s true status or abilities as a handler of terrorists were not always commensurate with the title conferred on him by Israeli intelligence.
In some cases, such people were killed without even knowing themselves that they were what Israel claimed they were. But veterans of the Shin Bet security service and of the Israel Defense Forces still remember the names: Adel Awadallah (who was killed with his brother, Emad, in an operation by the Border Police’s Yamam unit for counter-terrorism in 1998), Mahmoud Abu Hanoud (assassinated in 2001 after eluding several previous attempts to kill him), and Ibrahim Hamed (who was finally arrested, by the Yamam, in 2006).
Some of the terrorists also left a lasting impression on those who tried to capture them. Hamed, convicted of planning terrorist attacks in which a total 46 Israelis were murdered during the second intifada, eluded arrest for more than a decade. Israeli intelligence personnel, who periodically visited his family’s modest home, were impressed by his astonishing tidiness. In one of the apartment’s two rooms, Hamed kept his notebooks from university, “every letter in place, straight lines, meticulous handwriting like that of a German engineer.”
Hamed had no true successor in Hamas. The systematic preventive actions on the part of Israeli forces, along with the work of the Palestinian Authority’s security apparatus, undid the relatively orderly hierarchical structure of Hamas’ military headquarters in the West Bank. What remained was a looser alignment of regional organization: Nablus no longer issued orders to Tul Karm, Hebron did not coordinate positions with Ramallah. Every activist who tried to spearhead broader actions was quickly arrested or assassinated by the Israelis. The junior operatives with limited experience maintained a low profile in order to survive.
