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Israel: Tip of the Iceberg?
Ina Friedman
When Sela and Nadav Amar from the southern West Bank settlement of Adorah and Moshe and Ro�i Cohen of neighboring Telem were arrested in July for stealing as many as a quarter of a million bullets from the Israeli army stores and selling them (along with an Uzi submachine and a pistol) to agents of the Tanzim, it seemed
inconceivable. How could settlers, of all people -- the Israelis most vulnerable to Palestinian drive-by shootings and to attacks on their communities -- supply terrorists with the tools for more murder?
The shock and dismay were all the greater because last April 27, on a quiet Shabbat morning, Adorah itself was penetrated by three Hamas gunmen, who shot their way from house to house, killing four people (including five-year-old Danielle Shefi, murdered in her bed) and injuring seven others. Since the Amar-Cohen ring had been in operation for three years (by early August, 10 Israelis were in detention over the case), and the two pairs of brothers confessed under interrogation to having themselves sold 100,000 bullets taken from stores on army transport and air-force bases, it�s entirely possible that they fenced the very bullets that killed their neighbors. Exacerbating the gravity of the alleged crimes, it has been reported that the ring went on selling bullets even after the murderous attack on Adorah.
But for all the consternation that settlers had been engaged for years in selling weaponry to the Palestinians, the Adorah-Telem scandal is by no means the first time that Israelis have stolen from the army and sold the loot to Palestinians. And there are documented cases where such weaponry has been used to murder Israelis.
According to evidence released by the army, one of the 58 M-16 rifles that were stolen (together with RPGs, M2 machine guns, and dozens of boxes of grenades and ammunition ) from an arms depot in Kibbutz Manarah, in the Upper Galilee, in March 2001, was used by a Palestinian terrorist to kill three Israelis, and wound 16 others, in an attack at the Afulah bus station last October. Stolen by Jean-Pierre Elraz -- a former army intelligence officer who killed the depot guard to get his hands on the goods -- the M-16s were later traced to the territories. Ten of the rifles were purchased by a member of Force 17, Yasser Arafat�s presidential guard; 18 were sold to a member of the Palestinian Police; and the remaining 28, passed on by a high PA security official, eventually reached members of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad in Jenin, where 23 soldiers were killed during April�s Operation Defensive Shield.
The army has also reported that weapons stolen, apparently by Israelis, from a military base near Bethlehem in late 2000 were used in terror attacks in Jerusalem. And mortar shells fired at the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo in mid-July 2001 are likewise said to have originated in Israeli stores.
Beyond these cases, the army is unwilling or unable to specify how much of its weaponry has been stolen over the years, or the specific cases in which stolen weaponry has been used in attacks on Israeli targets. The Army Spokesman�s Office assured The Report that "the Military Police is not aware of any terror operations carried out by Palestinians in which IDF weapons were used."
Never the less, it�s been mooted and reported, in both the Israeli and the Palestinian press, that the territories are virtually awash with stolen Israeli arms. Privately, Israeli officials have talked about the Adorah-Telem scandal as being "merely the tip of the iceberg." At the time of the capture of
50 tons of arms aboard the Karine A -- seized by the Israeli navy in the Red Sea in on January 3, 2002, en route from Iran to Gaza -- PA head Yasser Arafat attempted to deflect attention from Israeli claims of his personal culpability by asserting that he had no need to import such mat�riel, since he said he had storehouses packed with Israeli weapons. And although Israel vehemently rejected his assertion of innocence over the Karine A, it did not deny his claim to stores of its arms.
Retired brigadier general Oren Shahor, a former coordinator of army activities in the territories, says the sale of stolen arms over the Green Line was "very common" in the pre- and early Oslo years. Indeed, former-Shin Bet security service official Shimon Romach reports that such trade dates as far back as the late 1960s, soon after the West Bank and Gaza were captured in the Six-Day War. "Throughout the years," he notes, "the most flourishing cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians has been not in business or in agriculture but in crime, and the weapons trade is one aspect of this."
Dealers on the receiving end readily volunteer that business picked up considerably after the Oslo Accords went into effect -- first in Gaza and Jericho in 1994 and then in the rest of the West Bank�s cities a year later. "Before then, when the Israeli army occupied the whole area, we had to be very careful," says Abu Sharar, a 30-year-old arms dealer from the Balata refugee camp, near Nablus, who�s been in the trade for more than a decade. "But after the PA took over, business became very brisk. Almost everyone wanted to have a weapon of his own. Uzi submachine guns are especially in demand, because young men think its �cool� to sport them."
Not all these weapons are stolen in Israel proper. Some are nicked directly by Palestinians in the territories -- from Israeli military vehicles, outposts, or settlers� homes. In January 2001, for example, three .30 mm. light machine guns were quietly lifted off an Israeli tank stationed in the West Bank village of Beni Musa, and another was stolen from a military vehicle in the Gaza Strip. According to the Judea and Samaria District of the Israeli Police, some 3,000 cases of the theft
of Israeli property by Palestinians were reported in the West Bank last year -- including an undisclosed number of weapons.
Former deputy Shin Bet head, Gideon Ezra, the deputy minister for public security, is convinced that most of the Israeli weapons that find their way into Palestinian hands are indeed stolen by Palestinians in the territories or, if swiped in Israel, reach the Palestinians via Israeli Arabs.
The most dramatic case of this sort occurred in February 1997, when Ibrahim Gadir, an Israeli Arab who had served as a tracker in the army for the previous seven years, represented himself as an on-duty soldier and simply drove off with a security-patrol vehicle, replete with arms and ammunition, from an outpost in northern Israel. (The job was done to fill an "order" from a member of one of the Palestinian security services.)
Since the outbreak of the current conflict in September 2000, Ezra notes, it is more difficult for Palestinians to enter Israel, and Israeli citizens have been forbidden (by the army) to enter Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. "But do you think it�s any problem for Israeli Arabs to reach the Palestinian areas?" he asks rhetorically.
In contrast to the Gadir case, the theft of arms and ammunition from army stores by Jewish Israelis -- "inside jobs" by corrupt officers and enlisted men, as in the current Adorah-Telem scandal -- is a far more painful subject for Israelis. It also appears to be a more recent phenomenon than the weapons trade by traditional Israeli criminals, and occasionally it has been discovered by chance. In January 1997, for example, a news photo showed Palestinian policemen in Hebron carrying IDF Glilon assault rifles. (According to the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Police were only to have American-manufactured Ingram rifles, supplied to them by Israel.) At the end of 2000, the army reported the theft of an undisclosed number and type of weapons from a base near Bethlehem; in June 2001 an Israeli soldier was arrested soon after weapons were stolen from an army base near Jericho; and last month two soldiers were arrested on suspicion of stealing guns and ammunition from a Civil Guard depot in the city of Kfar Saba and selling them to Palestinians. The Adorah-Telem gang may have garnered the biggest headlines but, clearly, they�re far from being the only Jewish-Israeli weapons thieves in town.
With reporting by Khaled Abu Toameh
August 26, 2002
Israel
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