On Tuesday, collaborators helped Israeli agents get to Mansour as well. Tipped off about his whereabouts, Israel sent helicopters to fire three laser-guided missiles through the window of his second-floor office, incinerating Mansour and killing seven other Palestinians, including two children. The weapon was different, but the modus operandi was the same: recruit collaborators from the target’s inner circle, get precise information on his daily whereabouts and his routine, then strike from a safe distance.
Israel says Mansour was involved in suicide attacks, including the one that killed 21 young Israelis at a Tel Aviv nightclub two months ago. In the interview last January, the Hamas figure defended the killing of Israeli civilians and praised the bombers but said he was a political leader, not a member of the group’s military wing. Either way, his death sheds light on an intriguing aspect of Israel’s assassination policy-the way the Jewish state uses Palestinian agents and gathers intelligence. “I think if there’s one conclusion that can be drawn from these operations, it is that Israel’s intelligence in the West Bank is very good,” said Danny Yatom, an erstwhile Mossad chief and adviser to former prime minister Ehud Barak.
Mansour saw the trend as an ugly outgrowth of Israeli military rule in the West Bank and Gaza. In the NEWSWEEK interview–which took place in the same Nablus office where he was killed this week–the Hamas leader said Palestinians had to purge themselves of the phenomenon. “The big collaborators should be tried and sentenced, and maybe in the end they should be executed,” he said. “Others can be rehabilitated.”
For the collaborators, the incentive is usually the money they get from Israel’s Shin Bet security agents, or the permission to work in the Jewish state. Israeli security sources say using collaborators in the assassinations has a double effect: it helps eliminate dangerous militants and it also sews paranoia in the ranks of groups like Hamas and the Islamic Jihad.
In the case of Mansour’s friend, Israel recruited Bani-Oudeh’s own uncle, Alan Bani-Oudeh, for the for the job, paying him a few hundred dollars a month to shadow the target and an extra $500 when they planted the bomb in his 1996 Subaru. On the day of the killing, Alan phoned his Shin Bet handler and told him Bani-Oudeh would be in his the car at 10 a.m. Moments after 10, Israel detonated the bomb by remote control from a pilotless plane circling over Nablus. By then, Alan Bani-Oudeh was far from Nablus, making his way to a meeting with his handlers inside Israel. According to Mansour, the Israelis told Alan Bani-Oudeh at the start of the meeting: “Your car is gone and so is Ibrahim.”
The Nablus killing has prompted the Palestinian Authority to intensify its crackdown on collaborators. Some Palestinians say Jibril Rajoub, the head of “Preventive Security” in the West Bank, has a special unit dedicated to weeding out the agents. Military courts are hearing collaborator cases every few weeks. A day after the Israeli strike, a Palestinian court sentenced three men to death for helping Israel’s November 2000 assassination of Thabet Thabet, a top figure in Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat’s Fatah faction. Later in the week, another suspected collaborator was condemned to die.
Mansour thought he had learned a lesson from his friend’s killing–that collaborators could be anywhere. “There’s a war underway between us and the occupation forces. You have to be aware of the things going on around you. You have to be cautious,” he said at the time, surrounded by a cadre of Hamas loyalists. It’s possible that the agent who helped Israel kill Mansour may have been in the room at that very moment.
