In the early morning of April 5, in the West Bank town of Tubas, an elderly man was milking his goats in his olive grove when he heard the whining of an unmanned drone in the sky. He looked up and saw Israeli special forces emerging from behind some trees on the nearby hillside and from cars with Palestinian plates to surround a small stone house that belonged to his son. ''Jaish, jaish'' (''army, army''), he shouted to his son, and told him to send his wife and daughter down the slope. He did not suggest that his son, Munqas Sawafta, try to escape. Sawafta had given refuge the day before to five Palestinian fighters, in the midst of Israel's Operation Defensive Shield.
''Would it have been acceptable for the host to run away and leave behind his guests?'' asked the father, in his red kaffiyeh, leaning on his cane. ''It was better he die with dignity than be killed as a collaborator.'' Someone had obviously tipped off the Israelis that the men were hiding in the house and that among them was Qeis Adwan, a 25-year-old Hamas activist, inventive bomb maker, mastermind of several devastating suicide-bomb attacks and charismatic political leader who had risen to the top of Israel's most-wanted list the previous summer. He had already escaped several attempts to capture or kill him.
The Israelis shouted an order to surrender. Sawafta came out the front door while one of the Palestinian fighters slipped out the back, skidding down toward the olive trees, firing his rifle. Both were shot dead. Tanks, helicopters and troops besieged the house. Around midafternoon, after hours of trading gunfire, the Israelis dispatched a neighbor with a white flag, to see if anyone in the house had survived the onslaught. In fact, Qeis Adwan and the three other fighters were still alive and armed. The neighbor told them they had two choices -- surrender or be martyred. The discussion was brief; they'd never surrender.
As an Israeli D-9 armored bulldozer ripped off the front of the house, one of the men had time to scrawl a message in blood on the bedroom wall above a white bed frame: ''Allah-u-Akhbar, Abu Hamza Said, Tulkarm'' (''God is great,'' his name and hometown). By dusk the four men were dead. Adwan was the last to die, shot in the head at close range. The next day, the military wing of Hamas, the Iz al-Din Al Qassam Brigades, issued a statement vowing horrific revenge: ''It will be a new kind of punishment this time, of an unaccustomed type that will shake their entity and destroy its pillars.''
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpa...5C0A9649C8B 63
ראשי
צ'אט
24-10-2008, 21:52
ארץ ישראל לעם ישראל - הציונות תנצח! 
מצב כלאיים
