Harpoon
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner and Samuel Katz
Hachette Books, 308 pp.
Mohammed al-Ghoul had no idea that loading cash-stuffed, leather suitcases into the trunk of his sedan would be one of the final acts of his life. Al-Ghoul was Hamas’s money man, responsible for distributing cash to the terror group’s members.
It was August 24, 2014 and the Gaza War wasn’t going well for Hamas. The Israeli Army (IDF) was wreaking havoc on the terror group, systematically knocking off its field commanders with unprecedented intelligence and accuracy. Hamas terror tunnels, some of which had taken years to construct, were being uncovered and destroyed by the IDF while the terror group’s rocket arsenal was dwindling rapidly.
But of even greater import for Hamas was the fact that its operatives weren’t getting paid. Some of its members hadn’t been paid for a month. Those that weren’t killed, wounded or captured began contemplating desertion. It was an untenable situation for Hamas.
Wiring money to Gaza wasn’t an option. Banks were on notice that wire transfers to the terror entity was a venture that carried high risk and little reward. But al-Ghoul had a plan that would provide a lifeline for Hamas.
Thirteen million dollars, secured from a friendly Muslim country, would be wired to the account of a moneychanger in Sinai. Once the moneychanger received confirmation that the funds were safely in his account, he would give a courier the cash. The courier would then smuggle it into Gaza via one of the many smuggling tunnels connecting the Gaza Strip to northern Sinai. Once in Gaza, the cash could be distributed to the fighters to stave off sagging morale and desertion.
Everything went according to plan. The courier delivered the cash to al-Ghoul, who along with his bodyguards began loading the trunk. Unbeknownst to al-Ghoul however, Israeli intelligence had been monitoring the entire sequence of events.
Lurking beyond visual range was an IDF AH-64 Apache Longbow armed with Hellfire missiles. A missile struck home instantly transforming al-Ghoul’s vehicle into a ball of flame and the car’s occupants into smoldering corpses. More importantly, most of the cash vaporized or otherwise became unusable. Hamas was unable to pay its fighters. Forty-eight hours later, Hamas, after losing 1,000 of its men, agreed to a ceasefire without a single of its demands being met.
Israel’s approach to combating terror has always been somewhat unorthodox but effective. The myriad of terror threats facing the Jewish nation is like no other in the world and compels those on the forefront of combating terror to adopt novel, cutting edge methods to defeat the threat. Harpoon, a new book co-authored by counter-terrorism expert Samuel Katz and human rights attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, of the Israel Law Center, provides us with intriguing insight as to some of those unique but very effective strategies.
In the early-1990s a few maverick-minded security officials understood that cash was indispensable to organized terror networks. They argued for the need to set up a special task force dedicated to identifying and tracking sources of terror financing and methods employed by terrorism’s financial enablers. In 2001, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sanctioned the creation of a special unit, code-named “Harpoon,” tasked to do just that. The unit was headed by Sharon’s old army buddy, Meir Dagan, who had held various security posts in the past and would end up becoming head of Israel’s vaunted Mossad intelligence organization.