Opinion & Comment
End of the Quiet Bomb

News Analysis

GSS head Avi Dichter referred to the apparent quiet during the last two and a half months as a "quiet bomb" in a speech he gave in Herzliya just two weeks ago. A seeming quiet, filled with alerts and thwarted attacks that miraculously did not result in injury and death. And last week that quiet officially ended and we were left with the bomb.

It was easy for the Palestinians to list the events of last Thursday in chronological order: An assassination mission in Gaza by the IDF Air Force, followed immediately by a Palestinian attack at Geihah Junction. This chronology is very convenient for the Palestinians and presents the terrorist attack as a reprisal for the assassination. Yet of course that was not the case. The sequence of events was mere coincidence. Everybody knows a terrorist attack cannot be planned and executed in such a short amount of time. Presumably the suicide bomber had already set out on his way by the time the Air Force struck in Gaza.

Yet once again public opinion (primarily outside of Israel) made the unavoidable equation: assassination = terror attacks. This equation is disadvantageous to Israel, particularly during the present period in which Sharon promised (to Egyptian Prime Minister Mahar) that Israel would keep quiet, i.e. would avoid assassinations in exchange for the Palestinians' avoidance of terror attacks.

Last week the long period of quiet since the major attack at Maxim Restaurant in Haifa officially came to an end. Eighty- one days went by without attacks inside the Green Line, but security figures say that really nothing stopped during this period. Palestinian organizations continued to dispatch attacks, but they were thwarted -- miraculously. Meanwhile the IDF did not stop for a moment its efforts at "focused prevention" to defuse ticking time bombs. Last week it just so happened that the IDF managed to thwart a ticking time bomb shortly before the Popular Front managed to execute an attack that caused civilian deaths.

Security figures did not hide the fact the IDF has reduced the amount of its preventive activity. Sharon explicitly said as long as there are no terror attacks there would be no focused preemptive attacks by the IDF. But the elimination of terrorist Muklad Chamid last Thursday was not a regular preemptive attack, but a case of a real time bomb. A press ban still restricts the publication of Chamid's precise plans, but security figures say for publication that he intended to execute a mega-attack and the plan was already in very advanced stages.

Chamid was the head of the military wing of the Islamic Jihad in Gaza. He was responsible for the deaths of the three soldiers killed at Netzarim recently as well as the shooting ambush last week as Kisufim. Yet Chamid had trouble executing attacks from Gaza and therefore he planned to carry them out via the West Bank. In the process of passing on instructions to Jihad members in Judea and Samaria the IDF learned of his plans to carry out a mega-attack. The IDF insisted Chamid's assassination was not a reprisal for his part in the killing of the soldiers at Netzarim and Kisufim but a classic preventive measure. Chamid was the epitome of a ticking time bomb, military officials said following his elimination.

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