Loai showed me a list of suspects. At the top were five familiar names. They were Hamas guys whom the PA had released from prison before the beginning of the intifada. Arafat knew they were dangerous, but with Hamas all but in its grave, he couldn’t see any reason to hold them any longer.
He was wrong.
The main suspect was Muhammad Jamal al-Natsheh, who had helped found Hamas with my dad and ultimately became the head of its military wing in the West Bank. Al-Natsheh was from the largest family in the territories, so he feared nothing. About six feet tall, he was every inch a warrior—tough, strong, and intelligent. Paradoxically, though he was filled with hatred for the Jews, I knew him to be a very caring man.
Saleh Talahme—another name on the list—was an electrical engineer, very smart and well educated. I didn’t know it at the time, but the two of us would eventually become very close friends.
Another, Ibrahim Hamed, led the security wing in the West Bank. These three men were assisted by Sayyed al-Sheikh Qassem and Hasaneen Rummanah.
Sayyed was a good follower—athletic, uneducated, and obedient. Hasaneen, on the other hand, was a handsome young artist who had been very active in the Islamic student movement, especially during the First Intifada when Hamas was trying to prove itself on the streets as a force to be reckoned with. As a Hamas leader, my father had worked hard to obtain their release and return them to their families. And on the day Arafat let them go, my dad and I picked them up from prison, stuffed everybody into our car, and got them settled in an apartment at the Al Hajal in Ramallah.
When Loai showed me the list, I said, “Guess what? I know all those guys. And I know where they live. I was the one who drove them to their safe house.”
“Are you serious?” he said with a big grin. “Let’s go to work.”
When my father and I had picked them up from prison, I had no idea how dangerous they had become or how many Israelis they had killed. And now I was one of only a few people in Hamas who knew where they were.
I paid them a visit, carrying with me the Shin Bet’s most sophisticated spy toys so we could monitor every move they made, every word they said. But once I started talking with them, it was clear they weren’t going to give us any solid information.
I wondered if maybe they weren’t the guys we were looking for.
“Something is wrong,” I said to Loai. “These guys didn’t give me anything. Could it be another cell?”
“It could,” he admitted. “But those guys have the history. We need to keep watching them until we get what we need.”
They indeed had the history, but history wasn’t enough to arrest them. We needed hard evidence. So we patiently continued to collect information. We didn’t want to make a costly mistake and grab the wrong guys, leaving the real terrorists free to launch the next bomb.
Maybe my life wasn’t complicated enough, or maybe it just seemed like a good idea at the time, but that same month I started a job in the Capacity-Building Office of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Village Water and Sanitation Program, headquartered in Al-Bireh. Long title, I know, but then again, it was a very important project. Because I didn’t have a college degree, I began as a receptionist.
Some of the Christians I attended Bible study with had introduced me to one of the American managers, who immediately took a liking to me and offered me a job. Loai thought it would make a great cover since my new ID card, stamped by the U.S. Embassy, would allow me to travel freely between Israel and the Palestinian territories. It would also keep people from getting too suspicious about why I always had plenty of spending money.
My father saw it as a great opportunity and was grateful to the United States for providing safe drinking water and sanitation to his people. At the same time, however, he could not forget that the Americans also provided Israel with the weapons used to kill Palestinians. This typifies the ambivalence most Arabs feel about the United States.
I jumped at the chance to be part of the biggest U.S.-funded project in the region. The media always seemed focused on the sexy bargaining chips—land, independence, and reparations. But water really was a much bigger issue than land in the Middle East. People have battled over it since Abram’s herdsmen fought with those of his nephew, Lot. The chief water source for Israel and the occupied territories is the Sea of Galilee, also known as Gennesaret or Tiberias. It is the lowest freshwater lake on earth.
Water has always been a complicated issue in the land of the Bible. For modern Israel, the dynamic has changed with the nation’s boundaries. For example, one of the outcomes of the Six-Day War in 1967 was that Israel took control of the Golan Heights from Syria. This gave Israel control of the entire Sea of Galilee, and with that came control of the Jordan River and every other spring and rivulet that flowed into and out of it. Violating international law, Israel diverted water from the Jordan away from the West Bank and Gaza Strip by means of its National Water Carrier, providing Israeli citizens and settlers with well over three-quarters of the water from West Bank aquifers. The United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars digging wells and establishing independent sources of water for my people.
USAID was actually more than just a cover for me. The men and women who worked there became my friends. I knew that God had given me this job. It was USAID’s policy not to employ anyone who was politically active, much less someone whose father led a major terrorist organization. But for some reason my boss decided to keep me. His kindness would soon pay off in ways he would never know.
Because of the intifada, the U.S. government allowed its employees to enter the West Bank only for the day and only to work. But that meant they had to pass through dangerous checkpoints. They actually would have been safer living in the West Bank than running the gauntlet of checkpoints every day and driving the streets in 4 x 4 American jeeps with yellow Israeli tags on them. The average Palestinian didn’t distinguish between those who had come to help and those who had come to kill.
The IDF always warned USAID to evacuate if it was planning an operation that would put them in danger, but the Shin Bet didn’t issue such warnings. After all, we were all about secrecy. If we heard that a fugitive was headed to Ramallah from Jenin, for example, we launched an operation without forewarning.
Ramallah was a small city. During these operations, security troops rushed in from every direction. People barricaded the streets with cars and trucks and set fire to tires. Black smoke choked the air. Crouched gunmen ran from cover to cover, shooting whatever was in their paths. Young men threw rocks. Children cried in the streets. Ambulance sirens mingled with screams of women and the crack of small-arms fire.
Not long after I started working for USAID, Loai told me the security forces would be coming into Ramallah the following day. I called my American manager and warned him not to come to town and to tell everyone else to stay home. I said I couldn’t tell him how I had gotten this information, but I encouraged him to trust me. He did. He probably figured I had inside information because I was the son of Hassan Yousef.
The next day, Ramallah was ablaze. People were running through the streets, shooting everything in sight. Cars burned along the side of the road and shop windows were broken, leaving the stores vulnerable to bandits and looters. After my boss saw the news, he told me, “Please, Mosab, whenever something like that is going to happen again, let me know.”
“Okay,” I said, “on one condition: You don’t ask any questions. If I say don’t come, just don’t come.”