2002 Hebron ambush

The 2002 Hebron ambush took place in the Wadi an-Nasara neighborhood in Hebron in the West Bank on 15 November 2002. Israeli forces were subjected to a double attack by fighters from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The battle was referred to in Israel as "The attack in the worshipers route",Hebrew: הפיגוע בציר המתפללים‎.[1] The place where the attack took place became known as the "Alley of Death" both in Hebrew and Arabic. The ambush was initially dubbed as the "Sabbath massacre" (Hebrew: טבח השבת‎) by official Israeli spokespersons.

2002 Hebron ambush
Part of Second Intifada
Date15 November 2002
Location
Hebron, West Bank, Palestinian territories
Belligerents
Israel Defense Forces Israel Border Police Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine
Strength
IDF Nahal brigade, Border police and the Kiryat Arba Emergency Response Team 3 fighters from Jerusalem Brigades, the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad
Casualties and losses
12 killed
15 wounded		 3 killed
No non-combatant casualties

The attacks were carried out in a narrow alley, off the passage from the south gate of Kiryat Arba to the Tomb of the Patriarchs by three Palestinian attackers. Twelve Israeli soldiers, gendarmes, and civilian security guards, including three high-ranking officers, were killed in the battle, as were all three of the Palestinian attackers.

The attack

One of the fighters positioned himself near the front of the exit gate of Kiryat Arba towards Hebron. The remaining two fighters positioned themselves near the a narrow alley off the road used as a passage by all Jewish worshipers heading from Kiryat Arba to the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

Four Nahal Brigade soldiers on patrol, accompanied by Border Police jeeps were heading out of the "Worshippers Way" after patrol that area. In addition, two additional Nahal soldiers were positioned in an observation post located nearby and several more IDF soldiers were located near the exit gate of Kiryat Arba.

A group of settlers from Kiryat Arba had visited the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron for a Sabbath eve service and were escorted back to the settlement by Israeli military. A few minutes after the all clear signal rang, signaling that all the settlers had safely returned to Kiryat Arba, the first bullets were fired.[2]

At 6:55 pm the Palestinian fighters opened fire simultaneously on a group of soldiers guarding the south gate of Kiryat Arba and a patrol passing through a narrow alley leading from the Tomb of the Patriarchs to Kiryat Arba. Two soldiers in the alley were wounded. One IDF paramedic was killed trying to evacuate the wounded.[3]

The Palestinian fighters moved positions frequently during the more than 4 hours of fighting creating the impression that many more fighters were involved. They lured Israeli forces off the "Path of Worshipers" into the narrow alley, later known as the "Alley of Death".

Minutes later Border Police Superintendent Samih Sweidan arrived at the scene and drove immediately into the alley to engage the Palestinian fighters and evacuate the wounded. He and his driver were shot to death, apparently at point-blank range, as they stepped out of their jeep. Meanwhile, one of the wounded trapped in the alley died of his wounds. The attack had hardly lasted five minutes and already four Israeli soldiers were dead. A few minutes later a fifth soldier was shot and killed. The killed and wounded soldiers remained in the exposed alley.[4]

Around 7:15 pm the Palestinian fighters ceased fire, creating the impression that they had run away. At this time the commander of the IDF Hebron Brigade, Colonel Dror Weinberg arrived at the scene. He quickly organized a force of three jeeps and entered the alley. When Weinberg reached Sweidan's jeep he was hit by a bullet and severely wounded. After being evacuated he died from his wounds, becoming the highest ranking Israeli casualty of the Second Intifada.

Before being hit Col. Weinberg had contacted the settler's security service, the Kiryat Arba Emergency Response Team. Around 7:40 pm the head of the response team, Yitzhak Buanish, entered the alley together with a force consisting of Buanish own men and Border Police soldiers. As in the previous rescue attempts, they were ambushed. Buanish and two of his colleagues were killed and another five wounded. Two Border Police officers were also killed in the incident. The first Palestinian fighter was probably killed in this incident as well.

At 7:50 pm the IDF entered the alley with armored personal carriers and started engaging the Palestinians. Firing continued until 8:15 pm when the Palestinians stopped firing back and the dead and wounded soldiers could be evacuated. But fighting flared up again.

Control over the situation was gradually restored with the arrival of reinforcements and commanding officers. Lieutenant Colonel Eran, head of the Nahal Brigade in Hebron, and soldiers from the Duvdevan elite unit, rushed to Hebron from Ramallah, outflanked the two remaining gunmen and killed them. That was close to 11:30 pm, more than four hours after the attack started.

The Islamic Jihad fighters

The attack was carried out by three members of the Jerusalem Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine. According to a statement by the Jerusalem Brigades the attack was intended as a revenge for Israel's killing of the regional Islamic Jihad leader Iyad Sawalha in Jenin earlier in the week as well as "other crimes against our people".[5] According to Israel, Sawalha was responsible for two suicide bombings that killed 31 Israelis.[6]

The three fighters were all in their early 20s and enrolled as engineering students at the Hebron Polytechnic. According to Palestinian sources they had prepared the ambush for more than two months, scouting the area of the attack thoroughly and especially studying Israeli security arrangements along the road between the Cave of the Patriarchs and Kiryat Arba. The operation was planned as a suicide attack and the participants had written their customary wills.[7]

Israeli responsive actions
See also: Worshippers Way

The Palestinian-administered part of Hebron was re-occupied by Israeli forces and a curfew was declared throughout the city. The curfew remained in force for more than six months. Four Palestinian houses were demolished by the IDF.[8]

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told IDF commanders in Hebron two days after the incident that a territorial continuity between the settlement of Kiryat Arba and the Jewish section of Hebron must be created and the safety of the Jews living in the divided city be ensured, reducing to a minimum the presence of Palestinians in the area in which the settlers live.[9]

The mayor of Kiryat Arba, Zvi Katsover, called on the government to "clean up the area" by destroying Palestinian buildings along a road connecting Kiryat Arba to Hebron.[9][10] The Kiryat Arba Council and the council of settlers in Hebron's Jewish enclave requested building of 1,000 housing units between Kiryat Arba and the Tomb of the Patriarchs. Housing and Construction Minister Natan Sharansky supported the plan and ordered his ministry's workers to review the possibility of expropriating lands in the city and using them for Jewish residential purposes.[11]

On 29 November 2002 the Israel Defense Forces issued the "Decree Number 61/02/T to Expropriate Property" with the purpose to expropriate an 8.2 dunam large area in Hebron and to create a 6 to 12 meter wide corridor linking the Jewish settlement in Hebron with Kiryat Arba. According to the American administration and Israeli sources close to the planning, the aim of the expropriation of the land and the building of the promenade was to create territorial contiguity between Kiryat Arba and Hebron.[12] The military order was appealed to the High Court of Justice. The petition was rejected by the High Court after the IDF declared that they intended to demolish only two houses.[13] In August 2004, three of the 22 buildings originally considered for demolition were destroyed. On 30 December a Palestinian teenager Imran Abu Hamadiya (17 years old) was apprehended by a Border Police patrol from his home near the Cave of the Patriarchs and found dead near the Hebron Industrial zone 20 minutes later.[14] After an investigation four border policemen were arrested. Apparently the young man had been beaten and then thrown out of the patrol car at full speed.

Reports and reactions

Official Israeli spokesmen initially described the battle as a massacre of civilian Israeli settlers returning from Sabbath prayers. Gilad Millo, spokesman of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, originally called the attack as the "Sabbath massacre," and Israel's Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a statement, calling the event "The cold-blooded attack on civilians whose only 'sin' was to go to a holy place of worship on the eve of the Jewish Sabbath and on those people assigned to protect them".International media outlets initially reported that the Palestinian ambush had targeted both settlers and soldiers.[15] The following day army officials said that only soldiers or security personnel were hurt in the ambush.[2] Matan Vilnai a former general and a leading Labour Party politician admitted that "[i]t wasn't a massacre, it was a battle."[16] On 15 November, the Spokesman for the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan condemned "the despicable terrorist attack... that today killed 10 Jewish worshippers on their way to the Sabbath eve prayers... [a] terrorist act against Israeli civilians".[17] but on 19 November, the Spokesman for Secretary-General said, "The information available to us when the statement was issued was that the victims were Israeli civilians returning from religious service...Subsequently, it now appears that the Israeli victims were in fact soldiers and security personnel" and urged "a broad approach to resolving the Middle East conflict".[18]

Fatalities

Islamic Jihad fighters[19]

  • Akram 'Abd al-Muhsen al-Hinuni, 20, of Hebron
  • Walaa' Hashim Da’ud Surour, 21, of Hebron
  • Dhiyab Muhammad 'Abd al-Mu’ti al-Muhtasib, 22, of Hebron

Israel Defense Forces

  • Col. Dror Weinberg (commander of the Hebron brigade), 38, of Jerusalem
  • Lt. Dan Cohen, 22, of Jerusalem
  • Sgt. Igor Drobitsky, 20, of Nahariya
  • Cpl. David Marcus, 20, of Ma'aleh Adumim

Israeli Border Police

  • Ch.-Supt. Samih Sweidan (Chief of Operations of Hebron's Border Police unit), 31, of Arab al-Aramshe
  • Sgt. Tomer Nov, 19, of Ashdod
  • Sgt. Gad Rahamim, 19, of Kiryat Malachi
  • St.-Sgt. Netanel Makhlouf, 19, of Hadera
  • St.-Sgt. Yeshayahu Davidov, 20, of Netanya

Kiryat Arba Emergency Response Team

Aftermath

The IDF conduct during the Hebron ambush was exposed to a lot of bitter criticism. Many settlers blamed the death of the three Kiryat Arba security men on the "cowardice" of IDF soldiers.[20] Three Israeli officers were dismissed from their posts in December 2002 for their personal failures in the Hebron ambush. The death of several high-ranking officers created a "command vacuum" that the remaining officers proved unable to fill, creating "a situation in which the decision-making fell into the hands of civilians (local settlers)", that is the Response Team members. "When civilians command the army - this is not an acceptable situation as far as we are concerned."[21]

In the site where the battle took place the "Giborim outpost" (מאחז הגיבורים) was constructed which originally included a small number of temporary structures and tents housed by the number of young people and families who demanded to build a neighborhood in the site in memory of the fallen. 30 days after the incident the outpost was evacuated by the Israel military forces. Since then the area has been declared as a 'closed military area' by the local IDF commander.[22]

The three Response Team members, who all worked full-time in the security service, were accorded military ceremony funerals "due to their involvement in Hevron security".[23] A month after the incident, the three killed civilian security men were formally recognized by the Ministry of Defense as "fallen soldiers."[24] The Israeli Chief of Staff posthumously granted the Chief of Staff Medal of Appreciation to Yitzhak Buanish, Alexander Zwitman and Alexander Dohan - the Kiryat Arba Emergency Response Team, as well as to Elijah Liebman, the chief of security of the Jewish community in Hebron.[25] After his death, Sgt. Gad Rahamim was granted the Medal of Courage for his part in the battle.[25]

On 12 December, a Palestinian fighter from Hamas walked up to two Israeli Military Policemen, from the Sahlav unit, doing guard duty outside the Cave of the Patriarchs and shot them point-blank. The two soldiers were identified as Cpl. Keren Ya'akobi, and Sgt. Maor Kalfon. The former was the first female operational fatality of the IDF in the Second Intifada.[26][27][28]

On 27 December four yeshiva students, two of them IDF soldiers, were killed in the Yeshivat Otniel shooting attack in the settlement of Otniel, south of Hebron. The attack was carried out by the same unit of the Islamic Jihad that carried out the Hebron ambush.[29] In August 2003 Muhammed Sidr, the head of Islamic Jihad in Hebron, was killed in an arrest operation in Hebron. The Hebron ambush was claimed to have been carried out "under Sidr's guidance".[30]

A month later Majid Abu Dosh was killed in similar circumstances outside Hebron. According to Haaretz Abu Dosh was "considered the "operations officer" of Islamic Jihad in the Hebron area, and the right-hand man of Islamic Jihad leader Mohammed Sidr. Abu-Dosh is said to have planned the attack on Worshipers' Way in Hebron."[31]

In December 2003 Nour Jaber, the head of the Islamic Jihad movement in Hebron, was sentenced to 17 life sentences for his role in planning the Hebron ambush operation as well as another attack on the Hesder yeshiva (military religious academy) of Otniel, where four yeshiva students were killed.[32]

Palestinian sources confirm that Jaber was actively involved in the planning of the ambush. A web page connected to Islamic Jihad celebrating the attackers mentions, apart from the three dead, Jaber's role in the attack and described him as the planner of the operation.

gollark: I did the "Morrisby" thing for school last year, and it said this, since the verbal one was basically a stupid vocabulary test and I read a lot.
gollark: Dyslexia?
gollark: < PotatOS Hypercycle™
gollark: * intriguing
gollark: Also, check out the PotatOS Development Centre.

References
  1. Felix Frisch (17 July 2003). "כתב אישום: תכנן את הפיגוע בציר המתפללים בחברון (Indictment: He planned the attack on worshipers' route in Hebron)". Yedioth Acharonoth. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
  2. Amos Harel (17 November 2002). "The attack in Hebron was not a 'massacre'". Haaretz.
  3. IDF Spokesperson (16 November 2002). "12 Israelis Killed in Sabbath Eve attack in Hebron". MFA. Retrieved 10 November 2011.
  4. Kalman Liebeskind (13 May 2005). "לבד, בסמטה, מול מלאך המוות (Alone in the alley, facing the angel of death)". NRG (Maariv). Retrieved 10 November 2011.
  5. "الكمين الأعظم عملية زقاق الموت ملف كامل (The great ambush, the Alley of Death operation, the complete file)". Saraya al-Quds web site. Archived from the original on 1 April 2012. Retrieved 7 November 2011.
  6. "Israel tightens grip on Hebron". BBC. 17 November 2002.
  7. "سرايا القدس: تنشر تفاصيل عملية "زقاق الموت" البطولية بمدينة الخليل (The Jerusalem Brigades publishes the details of the heroic "Alley of Death" operation in the city of Hebron)". Saraya al-Quds web site. 31 August 2009. Retrieved 20 October 2011.
  8. UN Docs Chronological Review of Events November 2002
  9. PM calls for territorial continuity from Kiryat Arba to Hebron. Haaretz, 17 November 2002
  10. "Sharon: 'Now Is the Time to Expand Jewish Control Over Hebron' - 2002-11-17". Voice of America. 17 November 2002.
  11. Hebron settlers plan to build 1,000 units in new neighborhood. Amos Harel and Nadav Shragai, Haaretz, 19 November 2002
  12. Pernicious promenade. Esther Zandberg, Haaretz, 12 December 2002
  13. "High Court gives IDF go-ahead to demolish two Hebron houses".
  14. Yael Stein, ed. (August 2003). "Status Report Hebron, Area H-2, Settlements Cause Mass Departure of Palestinians". B’Tselem.
  15. Christine Spolar (16 November 2002). "12 Israelis die in Hebron attack". Chicago Tribune.
  16. Nicole Gaouette (18 November 2002). "Israelis reinterpret a Hebron raid". The Christian Science Monitor.
  17. "SECRETARY-GENERAL CONDEMNS 'DESPICABLE' HEBRON TERRORIST ATTACK". UN. 15 November 2002. Retrieved 7 May 2013.
  18. "Israeli victims in Hebron were military, UN spokesman says, urging broad solution". UN. 19 November 2002. Retrieved 7 May 2013.
  19. Faris as-Saraya (26 September 2004). "الذكرى السنوية الثانية لعملية الخليل..من هم الثلاثة الذين زلزلوا اركان الصهاينة (The second anniversary of the Hebron operation: Who were the three who shook the foundations of the zionists)". Aqsaa.com. Retrieved 7 November 2011.
  20. Amos Harel and Ido Shai (17 November 2002). "Hebron ambush scene dubbed 'Death Alley'". H. Retrieved 17 September 2011.
  21. Amos Harel (13 December 2002). "3 IDF officers to be dismissed following report on Hebron attack". Haaretz. Retrieved 17 September 2011.
  22. Giborim Outpost Activists Arrested - Latest News Briefs - Israel National News
  23. Ariel Natan Pasko (18 November 2002). "Op-Ed: A Funeral of Heroes in Hevron". Arutz 7. Retrieved 17 September 2011.
  24. "Military Tombstones for Fallen Civilians Fighters". Arutz 7. 15 December 2002. Retrieved 7 May 2013.
  25. "אות הערכה הוענק גם לכיתת הכוננות של קרית ארבע (Medal of appreciation awarded to the emergency team of Kiryat Arba)". Arutz 7. 12 April 2005. Retrieved 10 November 2011.
  26. Amos Harel (13 December 2002). "2 soldiers killed in shooting attack in West Bank city of Hebron". Retrieved 7 May 2013.
  27. "Two Murdered in Hevron Terror Attack". Arutz 7. 12 December 2002. Retrieved 7 May 2013.
  28. Reuters (12 December 2002). "Israeli Killed in Palestinian Ambush in Hebron". The Irish Times. Retrieved 10 November 2012.
  29. Amos Harel. "Two of the four victims of Otniel attack were soldiers". Haaretz. Retrieved 1 September 2012.
  30. "Mohammed Sidr, head of Islamic Jihad in Hebron, killed during IDF attempt to arrest him". MFA. Retrieved 17 September 2011.
  31. Amos Harel and Arnon Regular (17 September 2003). "IDF kills Hebron-area Jihad leader". Haaretz. Retrieved 20 October 2011.
  32. Zohar Blumenkrantz, Roni Singer-Heruti (8 December 2003). "Islamic Jihad head in Hebron handed 17 life terms". Haaretz. Retrieved 17 September 2011.
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