Insariyeh, South Lebanon 1997
The Lebanese coastline seen from the “Israeli” missile boat was a coal black pencil stroke highlighted by the twinkle of lights from houses. Otherwise Lebanon was barely discernible against the moonless night sky.
Commander Yossi Kurakin, team leader of 16 naval commandos from the elite Flotilla 13 unit, gave the order to move. The heavily armed soldiers climbed into the dinghies bobbing beside the missile boat. Several commandos were weighed down by explosives for roadside bombs.
The dinghies would take them closer to shore. They would swim the final stretch.
As he clambered over the side, Kurakin grinned at his commanding officer.
“Don’t worry. It’ll be okay. I promise,” he said.
Once the commandos had embarked, the dinghies turned toward the distant shore and their objective, 2 kilometers inland at the village of Insariyeh.
For 10 days, Um Kamel, the southerners’ term for the MK drone  a pilotless reconnaissance plane  had flown over the fields and orange groves at the northern end of Insariyeh. Ghalib Farhat had seen the drones clearly from his one-storey house on the edge of the village. Their presence had puzzled him. Insariyeh was far from “Israel’s” occupation zone and there was little that could interest the “Israelis” in the village.
The naval commandos silently emerged from the water onto a rocky beach. It was the only stretch of coastline opposite Insariyeh with no buildings. But it was still risky. Even at this late hour, there was plenty of traffic. The team had to sneak across the road and pass through a gate in a 3-meter high concrete wall running along the east side of the highway to reach the cover of banana plantations and orange groves before continuing up the hill to Insariyeh.
The commandos darted across the road one by one. All 16 crossed safely and apparently undiscovered. Under the cover of a banana plantation, the team began the hard uphill march to the cliff-top village.
Ghalib and his wife Kouloud were watching television. Their children were asleep in the next room. Ghalib was still bothered. Hizbullah fighters were operating in the area. They had arrived in the village about the same time that the drones had appeared 10 days earlier. Each night at about 10pm, a car with its lights switched off drove slowly along the lane past his home toward the village of Loubieh, 1 kilometer to the north. Four or five people would climb out of the car and disappear into the orange groves. They were there again that evening.
Kurakin and his 15 soldiers were struggling up the hill, fighting through dense undergrowth. He paused and beckoned to the radio operator. Kurakin wanted to take a short cut. There was a track running westward between an orange grove and a windbreak of pine trees which would allow his team to move faster and bring him out midway along the lane between Insariyeh and Loubieh. His superior authorized the move and Kurakin led his team in the new direction.
It was after midnight. Ali AssadÂ’s shift at the telephone exchange in Insariyeh had ended. He locked up the office and with his two colleagues walked to their cars. His colleagues drove away and three minutes later Ali followed them, turning onto the road to Loubieh.
The “Israeli” team approached the lane between Insariyeh and Loubieh cautiously. Kurakin, the radio operator and one other soldier led the rest of the team by a few meters.
As they reached the gate near the lane, Kurakin motioned them to halt. He and his two companions darted across the road and crouched beside a pile of garbage. Kurakin turned to order the other commandos forward.
As he did so, a massive explosion engulfed the commandos, killing several of them instantly. Barely having time to recover from the shock of the blast, the team was hit by a second bomb which exploded in a huge bubble of orange flames with hundreds of steel ball bearings ripping through the “Israeli” unit.
Kurakin raced back across the road to help the survivors. Then the machine guns opened up from the orange grove to the north. A bullet struck Kurakin in the head, killing him instantly.
Ali Assad was speeding past the gate to the orange grove when the first bomb detonated. The blast slammed into the right side of the car, sending the vehicle into a 180 degree spin and throwing it off the road. The impact knocked Ali onto the back seat. He sat dazed for a moment, then heard machine-gun fire all around him. Ali crawled out of the back seat window and through the hedge into the orange grove. In the distance, a few hundred meters away, he could see the lights of houses on the edge of Loubieh. He had friends in the first house in the village. Ali began running through the trees.
At the sound of the first explosion, Amina Farhat, GhalibÂ’s mother, sat bolt upright in her bed, then fell to the floor. The sound of automatic gunfire was terrifyingly close, only 200 meters away. Were Hizbullah and Amal fighting each other again? she wondered.
The same thought occurred to Kouloud, GhalibÂ’s wife. But Ghalib, a former fighter with the Communist Party, realized the appalling gunfire was more than a spat between the two rival Shiite groups.
“Get the children up,” he ordered. As the terrified family took cover in his mother’s house next door, Ghalib noticed through the window the flash of a third explosion among the orange trees to the north.
The third blast was caused by a bullet striking explosives carried by Sergeant Itamar Ilya, the unitÂ’s sapper. The explosion tore Ilya into bloody fragments and killed even more of the beleaguered team around him. Eleven members of the 16-strong team were now dead and four others were wounded. Only the radio operator was unhurt.
As Ali Assad approached the home of his friends, the Abu Joud family, he noticed that the lights were on in an apartment belonging to Samira Shehade, another Palestinian friend. As he entered the building, Ali saw a car drive past heading toward Insariyeh and the battle.
The driver of the car was Hussein Younis, a baker from Msayleh. Sitting in the backseat of the car was Samira Shehade, Ali AssadÂ’s friend, whose lights still burned in her first floor apartment.
Hussein suddenly noticed black shapes moving on either side of the road just ahead of him and then orange flashes as the “Israeli” soldiers opened fire at his vehicle. The bullets punched holes through the windshield showering Hussein with glass as he ducked down on the passenger seat.
The carÂ’s momentum propelled the vehicle forward as machine-gun fire shredded the body. Hussein felt bullets tearing into him. One grazed his skull, another hit his arm, another his shoulder. More bullets ripped up his buttocks and legs as he crouched across both seats.
The car rolled off the road and stopped against a water pipe. But the “Israelis” still blasted the car from a distance of only 20 meters. He saw the dashboard above his head dissolve into splinters of wood, plastic and glass. Stunned and in pain, Hussein thought of pulling himself out of the car so that the “Israelis” could shoot him dead and end his agony.
The shooting stopped and Hussein crawled out of the driverÂ’s door onto the road.
“Get out of the car,” he croaked to Samira. He could hear her whimpering faintly and see she was not moving. There was nothing he could do for her. Hussein lowered himself onto the road and pulled himself into a ditch and hid.
The “Israeli” officers on the missile boat listened to the radio operator’s desperate plea for help with dread and horror. Clearly the mission had gone disastrously wrong. As helicopter gunships were summoned to evacuate the survivors and casualties, the commanders listened grimly to the sounds of the firefight transmitted by the unit’s radio echoing throughout the operations room.
Ali Assad reached the front door of the Abu Joud family, his Palestinian friends, and banged on the door. Like the Farhat family in Insariyeh, the Abu Jouds thought the fighting was between Hizbullah and Amal and had no wish to get involved.
“I am Ali Assad from Loubieh, let me in,” Ali said.
Im Ali opened the door and a pale-faced Ali stumbled in. “What’s happening out there?” Im Ali asked. But Ali was too shocked to speak and sat on a chair shaking.
Hussein Younis was certain he was going to die. Blood was pumping from a severed artery in his right forearm where a bullet had gouged a deep wound. He gripped his arm with his left hand to try to stem the flow. He was blinded by blood from his head wound. He could hear the “Israelis” around him, screaming hysterically in Hebrew. He tried to sit up and see through the undergrowth. An “Israeli” soldier stumbled toward him. Hussein froze and the soldier moved away. But he could see other soldiers firing their weapons in all directions, even in the air.
The thud of helicopter rotor blades alerted the surviving commandos that help was at hand. Cobra gunships clattered overhead and delivered a torrent of machine-gun fire and missiles into the trees, attempting to create a perimeter of fire so that the CH-53 rescue helicopter could land. The CH-53 touched down in an open field about 100 meters from the trees.
The helicopter was carrying reinforcements from Flotilla 13 as well as members of the “Israeli” Air Force’s medical evacuation force, known as Unit 669. The troops ran out of the rear cargo door and split into two groups. The naval commandos took up defensive positions beside the trees while the medics raced to the scene of the bomb blasts and began ferrying survivors and bodies into the stationary helicopter.
The machine-gun fire from the resistance fighters had died down. But the task of the helicopter crews was complicated by the heavy anti-aircraft fire from Lebanese Army units based in the area.
Hussein was beginning to feel cold. He could not move his left leg. The rotor blades of the helicopters whipped up dust and garbage from the rubbish dump scattering it over the road. He could see a large helicopter land in a field to his left and watched as the soldiers ran out the back. Another helicopter touched down to his right on the other side of a hedge in a clearing beside the orange grove. He glanced down at his crippled left leg. A rat was licking the blood from his wounds.
GhalibÂ’s children were screaming. Kouloud suggested to her husband that the family hide in the orange groves beside the house. But Ghalib said it would be safer to head toward the center of the village.
Gathering his family around him, Ghalib led them out of the house. Kouloud winced every time the night sky lit up with explosions and machine-gun fire. Between the deafening noise were moments of silence. She was certain that the “Israelis” would hear the slap of her daughter’s slippers on the road and start shooting at them.
The members of Unit 669 had a terrible task. Some of the commandos had been blown to pieces. But the medics were obliged to observe Jewish custom and recover the remains of each individual. While the “Israeli” soldiers performed their grisly task, Hizbullah mortar rounds began exploding nearby.
But the more direct machine-gun fire had withered away. The rescuers were certain that two bodies were missing and despite scouring the darkness could find no trace of them. What they did not realize at the time was that the remains of one of the missing commandos were already on board the CH53. The remains of the other commando, Sergeant Ilya whose explosives were detonated by a bullet, were lying scattered over the battlefield.
The Hizbullah mortar shelling continued uninterrupted and claimed a final victim. A doctor with the rescuing force, a major, was killed by shrapnel from a mortar round.
At 4.30am, four hours after the battle began, the last “Israeli” helicopter lifted off and headed south.
Hussein Younis was still conscious as the “Israelis” departed. After hours of commotion and noise, the sudden silence was unnerving. He had lost a lot of blood and was feeling the cold. Ignoring the pain from his bruised and torn muscles, Hussein crawled from the ditch toward his car. The asphalt of the road felt like a bed of snow. It was a little warmer once in the car and out of the wind. Samira was lying face down on the floor in the back of the car. It was clear to Hussein that she was dead.
Hearing approaching voices, Hussein looked through the shattered windshield to see two men walking down the road toward the scene of the battle. He called out to them and for the first time since he had driven his vehicle into the middle of the firefight, Hussein Younis thought he might live after all.
The sun was up and warming the dawn air as Ghalib Farhat walked toward the scene of the fighting. A row of pine trees was on fire, the smoke spiraling into the pale sky. Tree branches lay smashed and torn on the ground covered in rubbish from the garbage dump. Weapons, clothing, wetsuits, helmets and flippers left by the “Israelis” lay scattered around the site of the double roadside bomb blast.
Scattered among the debris of the firefight were pieces of human flesh  here, a jaw bone, there, a pile of white brain matter. Glancing up into the tree, Ghalib saw a human scalp hanging from one of the branches. Other indeterminate pieces of mashed flesh lay on the ground, like kibbe nayye, Ghalib thought with grim humor.
He recognized a car on the side of the road as belonging to his friend, Hussein Younis. There was no sign of Hussein in the vehicle but there was a body of a woman in the back seat. He recognized Samira Shehade, the Palestinian woman who lived down the road.
By now, resistance fighters dressed in T-shirts and jeans clutching automatic rifles were arriving on the scene along with soldiers, civilians and reporters. An “Israeli” drone buzzed overhead filming the bloody aftermath as army sappers inspected the area for unexploded bombs.
In a gruesome gesture that captured the horror of the battle, a grinning fighter lifted the severed head of Sergeant Ilya and held it aloft in triumph.
The bungled naval commando raid on Insariyeh resulted in the deaths of 12 elite “Israeli” commandos, the “Israeli” Army’s worst-single day casualty toll in south Lebanon since 1985. To add to the blow, the ambush came just nine hours after three Hamas guerrillas had blown themselves up in a crowded street in Jerusalem, killing seven civilians and wounding nearly 100 others.
Then “Israeli” Premier Benjamin Netanyahu, himself a former army commando, described the disastrous raid as “one of the worst tragedies which has ever occurred to us.”
Amid the inevitable recriminations in the aftermath of the raid were many unanswered questions. Had Hizbullah known the commandos were coming? Had Hizbullah passed on false information to the “Israelis” perhaps via a double agent to entice the commandos into a trap?
Still unknown is the objective of the raid. Speculation rested on the target being Sheikh Abdel-Amir Qabalan, the vice-president of the Higher Shiite Council. Local residents claimed that a senior Hizbullah official spent Thursday nights in the village and that the “Israelis” could have planned to kidnap him.
An “Israeli” Army commission of inquiry concluded that the commandos were the victims of a chance guerrilla ambush. Two more army inquiries were subsequently held over the next 18 months as well as a separate parliamentary probe. All were inconclusive.
Hizbullah has maintained silence over the affair  a ploy to keep the “Israelis” guessing. Three years after the raid and three months after the “Israelis” left south Lebanon, Hizbullah’s southern commander, Sheikh Nabil Qaouk, is still reluctant to reveal the truth behind the battle.
“It’s still too early to tell the secrets of Insariyeh. The “Israelis” know that Hizbullah was aware of the operation but they don’t know how. But I will say that our presence there was not a coincidence,” Qaouk told The Daily Star.
Hizbullah turned the battlefield victory into a propaganda coup, capitalizing on a mix up by the “Israelis” over the remains of the commandos which were subsequently returned to “Israel” in exchange for the bodies of resistance fighters and prisoners from Khiam detention center.
Hizbullah opened a website displaying photographs of the body parts of at least three different commandos, although the “Israeli” Army had told relatives of the dead soldiers that only Sergeant Ilya’s remains had not been recovered.
Despite, Hizbullah’s reticence, perhaps the clue to the heavy presence of resistance fighters in the area stems from an earlier “Israeli” commando operation. On the night of Aug. 4, a team of helicopter-borne commandos from the Golani Brigade landed on the outskirts of Kfour village, 16 kilometers east of Insariyeh. Spotted by local Hizbullah fighters, the two sides fought for two hours before the “Israelis” withdrew.
Shortly after dawn while on a sweep through the village, five Hizbullah fighters, including two senior commanders, were killed in a triple roadside bomb blast. The bombs had been planted by the commandos and detonated by a drone flying overhead.
Despite HizbullahÂ’s subsequent air of secrecy, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the partyÂ’s secretary-general, perhaps gave the most accurate account of the circumstances surrounding the Insariyeh battle during a press conference the same day. He said groups of fighters armed with roadside bombs had deployed throughout the South following the Kfour operation in anticipation of further commando raids.
“The nightwatchers are in most towns and villages, and are waiting for them using booby traps, rifles and mortar fire,” Nasrallah said.
Whatever the truth behind the battle, it was a major turning point in “Israel’s” occupation of Lebanon. Amid mounting troop casualties and growing calls from the “Israeli” public to withdraw from Lebanon, then-Defense War Minister Yitzhak Mordechai ordered a review of the strategic situation in the South. By December, “Israeli” outposts were being strengthened with reinforced concrete and patrols reduced. Other than limited raids along the edges of the occupation zone, no further deep penetration commando operations were conducted into Lebanon.
Today, the road between Insariyeh and Loubieh is just another quiet corner of the South.
Garbage is still dumped beside the road. The pine trees that were set alight by the machine guns of the helicopter gunships have been felled. But if you look closely near the gate leading into the orange grove, beside a pair of iron water pipes, there are two small holes in the ground, marking the spot where the bombs exploded. Seared onto the iron pipes in front of each hole are the flattened remains of dozens of steel ball bearings  the shrapnel in the bombs.
Surrounding trees still display splintered stumps where the branches were smashed by the bombs and machine-gun fire. Otherwise there is little remaining evidence of one the most bitterly fought and gruesome battles between the resistance and the “Israeli” Army.