THE ISRAELIS seem to regard all Palestinian men between the ages of 15 and 50 as Hamas fighters, but you know one when you see one.
When I came across a member of Ezzedine al-Kassam, the armed wing of Hamas, in Shifa hospital the other day, there was no mistaking him for a civilian. Something in Abu Barak’s bearing and muscular build set him aside from dozens of men crowding the hospital corridor.
The 18-year-old was tall, muscular, bearded and wore a tan jacket over a black shirt, khaki trousers and plastic sandals. A red and white keffieh, almost a Palestinian national symbol, was tied loosely around his neck.
He was a shy youth, torn between secrecy and the desire to recount what he’d seen. Barak spent the three weeks of Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead” at Al-Rayess Hill, in northern Gaza, where some of the worst clashes took place.
His job was to fire rocket-propelled grenades. The fighters worked in shifts, he told me, sometimes going home to their families for meals.
“We laid landmines for their tanks and vehicles,” Barak continued. “We planned to come up behind them, through tunnels, from the back, and shoot them. We were waiting in ambush, but they didn’t advance very far. We saw Israeli bodies, their blood, parts of their bodies. We tried to kidnap one. A group from our unit had an Israeli soldier, but an F-16 bombed them, killing the Israeli, four members of Kassam and an Egyptian volunteer.”
Captured soldiers are a nightmare for Israel. One justification given by the Israelis for the Gaza assault was the liberation of Gilad Shalit, a Franco-Israeli soldier who was seized by Hamas on the edge of the Gaza Strip in June 2006.
Shalit is likely to be exchanged soon for several hundred Hamas prisoners.
Israeli radio this week reported an investigation into the death of at least one Israeli soldier in an Israeli air raid. Barak says he knows of two Israelis killed by Israeli forces after being captured by Hamas. In addition to the man taken by his unit: “I heard a Kassam soldier on the radio say, ‘We’ve got him in the tunnel’.”
Abu Barak claims every Israeli soldier has a transmitter embedded in a tooth, to enable Israeli aircraft to locate them. The implied accusation was that Israel would rather kill captured soldiers than have them turned into bargaining chips by Hamas.
Ezzedine al-Kassam was founded in 1990, and is named after an Arab nationalist sheikh who was killed by the British in the Palestine Mandate in 1935. Barak joined the group two years ago, at age 16. “We are wild. We are strong,” he boasted. “It is very difficult to be chosen. We had to pass tests, of physical and psychological endurance, of our knowledge of the Koran. They don’t take just anyone. I am a volunteer for God and the prophet and our land.”
Barak says six members of his extended family were killed in the three-week war.
“I know a fighter who lost three brothers,” he says. “The more they kill, the stronger we become. It gives us more courage.” Barak brushes aside Israeli accusations that Hamas “hides behind civilians”.
“We are protecting civilians,” he emphasises.
And the Kassam rockets, fired at Israeli civilians, which provided the pretext for the Israeli assault?
“The ground forces left in 2005, but they put us under siege, and they are still killing us,” he says.
So is the war between Israel and Hamas over?
“It will continue,” Barak predicts. “Until the end of the world.”
