Press the button here and there the phone blasted! How Israel killed the most wanted terrorist with a single call in 1996

New Delhi: On October 19, 1994, a bus pulled up to Tel Aviv’s Route No. 5 Dizengoff Street. Even then, the area was known for its cafes, bars and shopping. On one of its aisle seats on the left was a thin, fair and round-faced man named Saleh Abdel Rahim al-Sauwi. he/she was unharmed, but his/her calm demeanor was tinged with anger and a thirst for revenge, Samuel M. Katz writes in his/her 1999 book ‘The Hunt for the Engineer’. In fact, Israeli forces had killed Saleh’s younger brother Hassin in 1989. At 8.56 a.m., Saleh got up from the seat without picking up his/her brown bag from the floor. he/she flipped a switch inside his/her jacket pocket. A wire ran from the jacket to the bag through his/her trousers and connected to a 20-kg T.N.T. For some time, no one knew that Saleh Abdel Rahim al-Saouvi was about to execute a big plan behind his/her hidden silence. That wire was connected to the future mishap. In a short while, there was a loud explosion in the bus parked there. The bus shattered like a toy. Most of the fiberglass frame melted. The New York Times reported the next day that a piece of the number 5 bus got stuck in the overhead cable 20 feet above and remained there for the whole day. The explosion broke the windows of another bus parked there which was passing in the opposite direction. The nearby car was damaged. Along with the damage to the bus, people also suffered a lot.

This was not his/her plan, the mastermind was someone else
In an instant, 21 people were killed and 50 were seriously injured. It was the deadliest terrorist bombing in Israel at that time. Saleh had carried out this plan, but he/she did not regret it at all. he/she kept repeating to himself that those who die in the way of Allah should not be considered dead. It was also revealed that this was not Saleh’s plan. The mastermind behind this was a 28-year-old Palestinian man named Yahya (or Yahya) Abdal-Tif-Ayyash. The English-speaking world found it easier to call him/her ‘The Engineer’.

Yahya is said to be the most notorious freedom fighter in the history of the Palestinian liberation movement. In 1994, he/she shocked Israel by detonating a bomb in front of a bus full of high school boys in the city of Afula. However, he/she was assassinated just 2 years later. Before his/her assassination, Yahya (or Yahya) Abdal-Tif-Ayyash had killed 150 Israelis and injured about 500. For many years after Yahya’s assassination, young people in Gaza wore T-shirts with his/her picture, and just a few years ago Hamas named its longest-range rocket ‘Ayyash 250’. But none of this was part of Yahya’s original plan.

wanted to be an engineer
Katz says Yahya was born in February 1966 to a farming family living in Rafat. he/she was a brilliant student and graduated from school in 1985 with a score of 92.8%. In his/her village, he/she was known as the boy who could fix old radios and TVs, and naturally, he/she chose to study electrical engineering at Birzeit University in Ramallah. When he/she completed his/her BSc Honours in engineering in 1991, Yahya wanted to go abroad to study for his/her masters, and eventually get a job in Jordan or one of the Gulf states, but the Israeli authorities rejected his/her application to go abroad, even though he/she had never been arrested and his/her family had a clean record. Israel’s refusal enraged Yahya. The bitterness towards Israel drew him/her into the world of Hamas.

want you alive or dead
The Israelis had made an enemy. he/she was a young, energetic and resourceful man before joining Hamas. Once he/she joined Hamas, he/she had shed rivers of blood through suicide bombers. There was no turning back after that. The Shin Bet, Israel’s counter-terrorism and counter-espionage intelligence agency, began laying its trap for Yahya soon after the April 1994 Afula car bombing that killed nine people and injured 55 others.

On July 11, 1994, the Shin Bet surrounded Yahya’s friend and deputy, 30-year-old Ali Osman Mohammed Atsi. They wanted to take him/her alive so they could get to Yahya, but Ali resisted and was gunned down. Hamas’ second most wanted man was gone, the first being Yahya. The group continued to play cat and mouse for the next 18 months.

A family man
The murder order for Yahya came from the top. Katz says in his/her book that an October 23, 1994, Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted an aide to then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as saying that Yahya Ayyash, the mastermind of the deadly attack on Dizengoff, is believed to be a dead man. It’s only a matter of time until we get our hands on him/her.

But days turned into weeks, and weeks into months. Often, Israeli commandos missed catching Yahya by just minutes. “More than once we broke in the front door only to find a mattress soaked in sweat on the floor,” one officer told Katz. But Yahya had one weakness: his/her family. he/she was advised to flee to Iran, Syria or Sudan, but he/she refused. Yahya took risks to visit his/her parents and wife in Rafat. Visits sometimes involved disguising himself as an old Arab woman, or an Orthodox Jew, or an Israeli army officer. The Shin Bet learned in June 1995 that Yahya’s wife was pregnant with their second child.

a big mistake
By the end of 1995, it was clear that Yahya was hiding in Gaza, a territory governed by the Palestinians. But the Palestinians were poor and could be expected to hand him/her over for the right price. Moreover, after living the life of a fugitive for three years, Yahya was showing signs of exhaustion and recklessness. he/she stopped sleeping in a separate bed each night. he/she began to rely on confidants and school friends. As 1995 was coming to an end, Katz writes, Yahya gave the Israelis the opportunity they needed.

While in Gaza, Yahya met Osama Hamad, a Hamas operative. The two had been friends at Birzeit University. Osama offered Yahya a place to stay in one of his/her uncles’ houses on Shaheed al-Khaluti Street, and Yahya accepted. he/she began living in the house under the name Abdullah Abu Ahmed and used Osama’s cell phone to keep in touch with his/her parents in Rafat (his/her pregnant wife and son were evacuated to Gaza later that year). What Yahya, and perhaps even Osama, did not know was that Osama’s uncle Kamal Hamad, a wealthy real estate broker and car salesman in Gaza, had been a Shin Bet informant for nearly 20 years. The father of 18 had gotten rich with Israeli help, and now he/she would pay back that debt with Yahya’s head.

call him/her and hit him/her
To capture or kill Yahya inside the Palestinian territory, the Israelis only needed access to his/her cell phone. If he/she took it with him/her, they could locate him/her. If he/she left it at home, they could plant a small explosive inside it, and trigger the charge when they were sure Yahya was using it. Yahya had made a long call to his/her parents on December 25, 1995, to talk about his/her newborn baby. Before hanging up, he/she set a date of January 5 for his/her next call. The Israelis had found their date, they just needed the phone.

This is how Yahya died
Kamal had gifted Osama a Motorola Alpha phone with the number 050-507497 about four months earlier. The New York Times of January 10, 1996 said Kamal would sometimes borrow this phone from his/her nephew. The Independent of January 9 said Kamal had asked his/her nephew for the phone, which he/she later returned the previous Thursday – January 4, 1996. Almost certainly this was the time the radio-controlled bomb was planted, The Independent reported. What happened next is history. This is what Osama told Patrick Cockburn of The Independent that the cell phone rang at 9 a.m. It was Yahya’s father, who asked to speak to him/her. I gave him/her the phone and heard him/her ask how his/her father was. I left the room to leave him/her alone. Five minutes later I returned because I thought he/she had finished his/her talk. I saw Yahya lying on the ground covered in blood. he/she had no head.

The New York Times gives some more details. It says that Yahya’s father first tried to call the landline, but the phone was not answered. Apparently the attackers had blocked the house’s regular phone line. Then they dialed Osama’s cell phone. This is what Joel Greenberg of the New York Times wrote: I told him/her we did not want to talk on this telephone. The father mentioned fear of surveillance by the Israelis, but he/she said we could talk. When I told him/her again, ‘No,’ he/she asked, ‘How are you?’ Then the phone blew up.

How did the Shin Bet know that Osama had given the phone to Yahya? Greenberg reported that the sound of a plane hovering over the neighborhood was heard. Israeli press and television reports said the phone-bomb was detonated by a radio signal from the plane after Mr. Ayyash was identified as the man talking on the cell phone.

old book page
When thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah operatives exploded across Lebanon on September 17, 2024, it seemed as if Israel had dealt its enemies a state-of-the-art punishment, but the story of Yahya Ayyash shows that they have done it before. The question is, what will happen now? On February 26, 1996, a suicide bomber blew up a bus on Jerusalem’s Route No. 18, killing 25 people and seriously wounding 80. Just a week later, another No. 18 bus was blown up. Nineteen people were killed and more than 20 were seriously injured. This was Hamas’ revenge for Yahya’s killing. It is now 2024 and Hezbollah has been hit hard. Will it take this humiliation in silence?