15-Aug-14: Terror and children

Our Malki, June 2001

In accordance with the Hebrew calendar, tomorrow - the twentieth day of the month of Av - we remember our daughter Malki's life and its tragic and cruel end. On that date, thirteen years ago - August 9, 2001 - she was one of fifteen innocent people murdered in a Hamas human-bomb attack directed, after careful planning and research, at a pizza shop located at one of the capital of Israel's busiest intersections. Frimet Roth honours our daughter's memory with this op-ed published today by the Times of Israel.

When children are the target: Defeating the terrorists and remembering their victims

FRIMET ROTH | Times of Israel | August 15, 2014

In the wake of Operation Protective Edge, Israel is enduring an unprecedented deluge of condemnation. This is trying for the entire nation but is especially infuriating for families like mine.

The crux of the vitriol is the large number of Gazan casualties in this latest conflict who were children. The blame for this is planted squarely at the feet of the Israel Defense Forces for firing at an enemy that attacks from positions in close proximity to those children. 

Most Israelis are aware that our army was forced to do so in order to protect its own civilians. 

In contrast, scores of Jewish children were targeted and murdered in cold blood by that same enemy during the Second Intifada. Yet few remember them; their stories have been virtually erased from the Palestinian-Israeli narrative. But we have not forgotten and we never will because our precious fifteen year old, Malki, was one of them. 

In those pre-security-fence days between 2001 and 2003, when Israel was shockingly lax about enemy infiltration, Hamas was able to invade our borders practically unimpeded. It executed a series of bloody terror attacks against us without any missiles or tunnels. On a near-weekly basis, innocent Israeli men, women and children perished at their hands.

Neither the United Nations Human Rights Council nor its predecessor, the UN Commission on Human Rights, ordered an inquiry into those violations of our human rights. If challenged about that apathy, the UN would probably have pointed out that Hamas was a mere rag-tag terror group and as such lay outside their purview. But since 2007, Hamas has been Gaza's democratically elected government operating under the same principles which guided it previously.

My daughter's murderer, Ahlam Tamimi, is proof of that.

Prying apart baby carriages in the street amid the carnage outside Jerusalem's Sbarro pizza shop
shortly after the human-bomb attack by a Hamas jihad squad, August 9, 2001 [Image Source]

One of the most productive, lauded and evil operatives Hamas ever had, Tamimi was released along with 1,026 other terrorists in the Shalit Deal which Hamas wrung out ofIsrael in 2011.

Shortly afterwards, she was interviewed [link] by a Kuwaiti TV presenter, Mohammed Al-Awadi. She related to him her modus operandi in chilling detail quoted below: 

I entered a [terrorist] cell. A cell is constructed by having a leader, then there are different groups; each one is divided into itself... You do not know who the leader is... First, I scouted places to decide where to carry out Jihadi operations... I would wander into Jerusalem to find the best spots to carry out these missions... First, I would scout stores and major shopping malls… schools, restaurants… I would then present my findings to the leader of the cell... I would do a meticulous count on the numbers of people moving in these areas and study it mathematically. I would use my wrist watch and count how many were walking in an area within one hour. So I would make reports that if an operation is conducted in such and such area. Then I would estimate the numbers of casualties; in some cases my number would be 30 Israelis will die and other estimates it would be 50 Israelis that will die... So from this time to that time there would be 70 Israelis who entered this spot. So during lunch for example, from this time to that time, so many Zionists enter this area. The school for example, I would study the morning time when school children would enter.

It would be convenient to argue that Tamimi committed that massacre in a bygone era. One could be deluded into believing that Hamas has matured with time; that it has evolved into a sane pragmatic entity; that it has discarded the ethos embodied by Tamimi and her cohorts.

But Tamimi remains a key part of Hamas’ war against Israel. Throughout Operation Protective Edge, Tamimi played a major morale-boosting role for the Gazans. She hosted a series of hour-long "resistance" programs, broadcast throughout the Arabic speaking world via the influential and globally-accessible Al Quds satellite television channel. Over the past two years, Al Quds has carried Tamimi’s weekly program, "Naseem Al Ahrar" (“Breezes of the Free”) celebrating the Islamist terrorists imprisoned in Israel. Those Al Quds programs are regularly uploaded to YouTube, often in high-definition quality. Her message of incitement against Israel and Jews is plainly one that Hamas is eager to disseminate widely.

Tamimi appearing on Kuwaiti interview show, July 2012,
  boasts of her role in murdering Jewish children

Israel's critics in the West seem incapable of acknowledging the evil of the Hamas ethos and its goals. Of Tamimi, the Hamas Wonder Woman, they seem basically unaware. In fact, Tamimi, who notoriously smiled with pleasure when she learned that there were eight dead children among the victims of the Sbarro massacre, is not even on their radar.

My husband and I must live each day with the painful realization that Tamimi is spewing her venom unhindered, while our pure, sweet kind Malki is gone.

The following is Malki’s journal entry after the June 2001 terror attack on a Tel Aviv discotheque frequented by teenage Russian immigrants. She had spent that Saturday at a retreat (a Shabbaton) conducted by the youth movement to which she belonged. Her words convey the angst she and her friends suffered during those days of unabated terror attacks in Israel. 

"There was one question that I really didn't understand. I just couldn't manage to understand. How is it that if everything is predetermined and known beforehand in Heaven? How is it that we are able to "remove the evil decree" and change things? It took Meir [the counselor] three hours to explain this, ‘till 3 in the morning. In the end, I understood it so well that now I explain it to my friends... Everything is known beforehand [but] without the element of time, and it is known that when you pray, you cancel a terror attack… At the morning prayers, we were notified that there had been a terror attack at the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv last night and that there were many killed. That was it. I fell apart. Rafi's [another counselor] group gathered in our room and everybody just cried. We were broken. When Rafi arrived he made kiddush and simply didn't know what to do. He truly didn't know what to tell us."

The threat to Israel's existence posed by Hamas will not be eradicated until the world recognizes the special role that the murder of children has always had, and continues to have, in the Hamas outlook on life. 

3-Feb-13: Little noticed, unjustly-released terrorists are in charge of the ongoing jihad attacks against Israelis

The remnants of the Tel Aviv Dolphinarium, eleven years after
the June 2001 massacre [Image Source]

We tried, and failed, in October 2011 to arouse public outrage here and abroad at the incomprehensible decision by the government of Israel to surrender to Hamas demands and to free 1,027 terrorists. More than 800 of them (by our calculations, some 79.3% of the total) were behind bars for shooting or hurling explosives at human beings, or injuring or murdering or attempting to murder them.

We said then, and before and after, that we ordinary Israelis will find ourselves eventually having to pay an unbearably heavy price for the foolishness of the decision to open the doors of Israel's prisons and to release a vast horde of unrepentant killers and would-be killers of Jewish children.

But, as we said, our words fell on far too many deaf ears, particularly in the circle of decision makers here in the nation's capital.

Now please think back to June 1, 2001.

A warm Friday night in Tel Aviv. A disco on the premises of  a beachfront structure known as the Dolphinarium. A young Palestinian Arab terrorist, carrying a bomb and on a mission inspired by a religious leadership, merges with the crowd of mainly Russian-speaking youngsters, most of them recent immigrants to Israel. On orders from his Hamas masters, he explodes: 21 of the young people are killed, 132 injured. Families and futures shattered. Lives irreparably demolished.

One of those Hamas masters is a man called Husam Atif Ali Badran (sometimes written Hussan Badran), one of the senior Hamas operators overseeing the Sbarro massacre. Nine years ago, in 2004, Badran was interviewed by two prominent journalists from the Israeli daily Haaretz, Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel who were preparing a book about the second "intifada". In their words, he "spoke relatively candidly about Hamas policy and his involvement in operational decision" though he did hold back from discussing his personal role in specific acts of murder and terrorism.

In an article published in Haaretz in October 2011, Issacharoff and Harel recalled what Badran had told them seven years earlier. Some excerpts (all of them quoted verbatim) from that 2011 article:

• Hussan Badran is the most senior Hamas prisoner from the West Bank who is scheduled to be released tomorrow in the prisoner swap for Gilad Shalit. Badran may be getting out of prison, but he will not be going home, as Israel insisted that he be deported.
• Now 45, Badran, is from the Askar refugee camp in Nablus. He was identified by the Shin Bet security service at the beginning of the second intifada, which began in September 2000, as the head of the military wing of Hamas in West Bank.
• Although intelligence information pointed to his involvement in suicide bombings, including the terrorist attack at the Tel Aviv Dolphinarium in 2001, in which 21 people were killed, he was never convicted of murdering Israelis, as most of his counterparts were. During four months of harsh Shin Bet interrogation, he provided only limited information and was ultimately only convicted of less serious offenses such as membership in an illegal organization. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison.
• Badran called the second intifada a "gift from God," from Hamas' standpoint, saying that the organization had reached a low point between 1997 and 2000. The entire leadership of the organization was either in Palestinian Authority prisons or Israeli ones, he said, and the military wing of Hamas had essentially disappeared. "But within two weeks of the outbreak of the intifada, after our prisoners were released from Palestinian Authority prisons, we had brought our power back on the street," he said.
• Hamas, he said, returned to committing terrorist attacks two weeks after the start of the second intifada in reaction to pressure from the Palestinian street. "Fatah was only carrying out shooting attacks. People wanted to see revenge for our dead, operations inside the territory of Israel," he said, explaining that Hamas leadership decided that terrorist attacks should be carried out wherever possible.
• He said some of the Hamas terror attacks, including the attack at the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem in 2001, were carried out in revenge for the assassination of senior Hamas officials in the West Bank.
• "I believe I will get out of jail," he told us in 2004, "if not as a result of a peace agreement, I will get out in a prisoner swap.

And he did. 

Recall how the British newspaper, The Guardian, no great friend of Israeli policies, reported on Badran's part in the 'Gilad Shalit for Terrorists' transaction of October 2011:

Fresh lilies are regularly laid at a monument by the Tel Aviv Dolphinarium bearing witness to an evening in 2001 when 21 Israeli teenagers were killed while queuing outside a nightclub. Another 132 were injured in the attack by Saeed Hotari, a young Palestinian suicide bomber affiliated with Hamas. But last week flowers arrived more in protest than in sorrow. Husam Badran, the former head of Hamas's military wing in the West Bank and instigator of the Dolphinarium attack, is expected to be among 477 Palestinian prisoners released on Tuesday in a deal to free Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. A further 550 will be freed within two months. "It's surreal. It's beyond belief," said one young mother angrily as she looked at the monument. "I may be the only one against it, but no good deal sees the release of 1,000 killers. People say Netanyahu showed courage in agreeing to set them free, but I say he has given in to terrorism."

Poster at entrance to Filisteen elementary (!) school, Qalqilya, 
in January 2003 depicts ‘Abd al-Rahman Hammad (center), 
who planned 2001 massacre at Dolphinarium Tel Aviv 
and Sa’id Hassan Hutri (left) who carried it out [Image Source]

Badran is Prisoner Number 269 on this list issued by the Israel Prison Service on the eve of the massive release of the 1,027. He walked free to so-called exile in Qatar where it now appears he has been busying himself these past 16 months with what he knows best - plotting against the lives of Israelis.

On Thursday, the IDF announced that, together with agents from the Shabak, it had penetrated a terror cell in Hebron and

uncovered and disrupted a terror infrastructure belonging to the military wing of Hamas, which had acted to establish a regional headquarters so as to carry out attacks in the area of Hebron... 20 terrorists – known Hamas members who had previously served prison sentences in Israel for terror activity – were arrested. The investigation carried out by the security forces revealed that the arrested operatives had intended to carry out terror attacks, particularly kidnappings. The terrorists had already begun preparations to carry out a kidnapping, trying to find an apartment to use as a hide-out and an Israeli citizen to serve as a driver for the intended attack. Over the course of the investigation, much combat equipment belonging to the members of the terror infrastructure was discovered... Members of the terror infrastructure maintained contact with Hamas officials abroad so as to receive assistance, directions and funding. The primary contact person abroad was Husam Badran, one of the prisoners released in the prisoner exchange that secured the release of a kidnapped IDF soldier, Gilad Shalit... Upon his release in October 2011, he was exiled to Qatar. The terrorists were indicted... [source]

There has been only minor coverage of the arrests here and virtually none abroad. As to the central role of the Qatar-based Badran to the machinations of the terrorist gang, even less.

It's a source of enormous gratitude that Israel's security apparatus continues daily to pursue and frustrate jihadists in the service of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah and the others. It's a dangerous, thankless task, carried out with very little fanfare. But as everyone following these things knows, it's a statistical certainty that one of these days (Heaven forbid) they will arrive on the scene too late to stop one particular jihadist who will carry out his mission and be acclaimed as a martyr throughout the length and breadth of Palestinian Arab society and other parts of the pro-terrorism world. That's all it takes - just one of these ruthless, murderous thugs. The numbers are against us - the targets and victims.

Our side knowingly put 1,027 of these people back out on the streets. And somehow the reports of them being re-arrested or stopped in the course of doing more of their terrorism are being soft-pedaled in the news media or go unreported. The result is that there are highly-motivated murderers and terrorists with years of experience and deep resources who are now in place, scheming and planning the unthinkable, far from the gaze and awareness of most of us.

If, as the saying goes, ignorance is bliss, many are probably pleased with how the various outcomes of the Shalit transaction are evolving.