Israel Hands US Names of Jenin Hizballah and al Qaeda Fighters

A terrorist attack in one of Israel’s main cities was prevented by the 24-hour Israeli incursion into the West Bank town of Qalqilya, which ended Friday night, April 26. Prior intelligence of this plan prompted the foray. This information was passed to the United States. Another batch of intelligence, transferred earlier in the week to Washington, consisted of materials that Israeli forces collected during their eight-day stay in the Jenin camp.
The Sharon government is handing all this intelligence data over to Washington in order to get its side of the story across before the fact-finding team appointed by UN secretary general Kofi Annan goes to work on Sunday April 28. Israeli officials set little store by the bona fides of UN secretary general Kofi Annan and his fact-finding team. To offset hostile findings, Israel has set up three lines of defense.
A. An information campaign shedding light on the credibility and objectivity of the UN panel members.
B. Its handover of intelligence data gathered in the Jenin camp to Washington to ascertain its proper exposure and to make sure it is not buried at of sight.
C. Pressure on the UN secretary to co-opt to the panel intelligence and military observers qualified to evaluate intelligence evidence.
D. Israel hopes the intelligence data it has handed over will be produced by the United States (or Israel) as grounds for a veto of an anti-Israel resolution at the UN Security Council, if such a motion is based on negative findings by the fact-finding delegation.
debkafile‘smilitary sources reveal some of contents of these intelligence documents:
They includes evidence that the Jenin camp’s bosses were engaged – not only in launching multi-casualty suicide attacks in Netanya and Tel Aviv – but also secretly plotting and organizing large-scale suicide hits for American cities. Local residents with relatives in America had been approached with demands to arrange trips for terror activists to visit these relatives, flying out through Amman or Beirut. Those terrorists were given specialist training in the manufacture of explosives from chemical substances and fertilizers readily available in American shops, and equipped with fake passports and phony US visas. The Israeli operation in the camp aborted this plot.
Another collection of documents passed to Washington includes photographs of a special torture room in Yasser Arafat’s Jenin headquarters complex, which was located in the building opposite his office. Israeli intelligence officers who took the pictures found documents proving that the facility was used to torture Jenin families who refused to release their sons for suicide missions. These findings were handed over to the Americans as proof of Arafat’s involvement in recruiting “martyrs”.
A third archive shows the Jenin camp as being secretly governed by Lebanese Hizballah and al Qaeda agents who also trained the locals for terrorist operations. The file contains their real names and functions, as well as their code names. They set up a collective leadership for the Jenin camp in which all the local groups and factions were represented – after the Afghan Taliban model – in contrast to the Palestinian hierarchical establishment, topped by Arafat. Jenin’s leaders dubbed the camp, known in Israel as the Suicide Capital of the West bank, the Palestinian Kandahar.