The New York Times - USA (2020-06-25)

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONALTHURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2020 N A

AL JIFTILIK, West Bank —
Hamdan Saeed rises at 5:30 each
morning to sell hot coffee to Pales-
tinian and Israeli motorists along
Route 90, the main highway
through the Jordan Valley, a re-
source-rich borderland in the oc-
cupied West Bank.
But Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s push to annex the
area has him worried that he
could lose his livelihood if his tiny
farming village is blocked off from
the road.
“We have no idea what annex-
ation would mean for us, because
nobody is telling us anything,” Mr.
Saeed, 49, a father of three who
makes around $20 a day, said at
his makeshift coffee stand on a re-
cent blazing hot morning. “Who
knows if I’ll be able to come
here?”
Palestinians in the Jordan Val-
ley have been left in the dark
about how annexation would af-
fect them. Many worry that it
could block them from their farm-
lands, prevent them from getting
to their jobs in Israeli settlements
and choke off their villages behind
walls, fences and checkpoints.
Mr. Netanyahu has vowed to be-
gin the process of annexing parts
of the West Bank as soon as July 1,
encouraged by the Trump admin-
istration’s proposal for resolving
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The unilateral annexation of oc-
cupied territory has been widely
condemned by other countries as
illegal.
While Mr. Netanyahu has not
released his plan, he has promised
to include the Jordan Valley, a 620-
square-mile farming region that
would give Israel a permanent
eastern border abutting Jordan.
Mr. Netanyahu considers the val-
ley a nonnegotiable requirement
for Israel’s security.
He has suggested that he would
carve out Palestinian villages,
which would “remain as Palestin-
ian enclaves.” Israel would not
“apply sovereignty over them,” he
said in an interview with an Israeli
newspaper last month, but would
retain “security control.”
Presumably the enclaves and
their residents would be con-
nected to a larger Palestinian enti-
ty in the West Bank, but Mr. Ne-
tanyahu has not explained how
such a system would work, and his
office declined to comment.
But Mr. Netanyahu’s pledge has
fueled concerns among Palestin-
ian residents that they would be
confined to isolated islands.
“What he’s saying is we should
be put in small bird cages,” said
Hazem Abu Jish, 53, a conven-
ience store owner in Furush Beit
Dajan, a village in the northern
Jordan Valley. “How can we live
like that? What if I need to go to
the hospital in Jericho for an
emergency? Will I no longer be
able to drive there in a half-hour?”
Jihad Abu al-Asal, the Palestin-
ian Authority’s governor of Jeri-
cho and the Jordan Valley, said
that Mr. Netanyahu seemed to be
willing to jeopardize Palestinian
communities to advance annex-
ation.
“He thinks we are like pawns,”
Mr. Abu al-Asal said in an inter-
view. “He thinks he can do what-
ever he wants with us to achieve
his goals. What he wants to do is to
formally institute an apartheid
system.”
Mr. Netanyahu has said he
would not annex the Jericho area,
home to more than 40,000 Pales-
tinians. A conceptual map in the
Trump administration’s proposal
leaves Jericho under Palestinian
control, as does a map Mr. Netan-

yahu proposed when he first

promised to annex the valley last

fall.

The valley, which Israel has

controlled since the 1967 Arab-Is-

raeli war, comprises approxi-

mately a quarter of the West Bank

and lies hundreds of feet below

sea level. Outside of the Jericho

region, it is inhabited by about

12,000 Palestinians and 12,500 Is-

raeli settlers.

Israeli authorities already pro-

hibit Palestinians from building

on most of the territory and deny

them access to large parts of it,

over half of which has been de-

clared a closed military zone, ac-

cording to Peace Now, an anti-set-

tlements group.

Palestinian villages in the Jor-

dan Valley regularly face power

outages and receive far smaller al-

locations of water than neighbor-

ing settlers, according to several

Israeli nongovernmental organi-

zations.

“They give more water to the

fruits and vegetables than the

people,” said Ibrahim Obayat, the

mayor of the village of Fasayil, re-

ferring to Israeli farms in the area.

Israeli officials say they are not

to blame for shortages of water

and electricity.

Danny Tirza, a former Defense

Ministry official who worked on

zoning issues in the West Bank,

said the local utility, the Jerusalem

District Electricity Company, has

not renovated its infrastructure

and does not purchase sufficient

electricity from Israel to cover

Palestinian demand there.

He blamed the Palestinian Au-

thority for the water shortage,

saying it has refused to work with

Israel to advance projects that

would benefit both Palestinians

and settlers. The Palestinians,

alongside most of the interna-

tional community, consider the Is-

raeli settlements to be illegal.

Whoever is at fault, farmers in

the valley fear that annexation

will only make matters worse.

Abdo Moussa, 29, a farmer from

Al Jiftilik, said Israeli authorities

have squeezed Palestinian com-

munities in the area for decades

by cutting off their access to land

and providing inadequate serv-

ices.

“It’s always been that Israel

wants the land but not the people,”

said Abdo Moussa, 29, a farmer

from Al Jiftilik. “They’ve tried en-

couraging us to leave our land by

refusing to grant building permits

and barely giving us enough wa-

ter and electricity. I’m not sure the

situation can get much worse, but

I’m afraid they’ll find a way to do

so.”

Momen Sinokrot, the managing

director of Palestine Gardens, a

date exporting company near

Jericho, said the prospect of an-

nexation adds another challenge

to his business, which has already

faced a number of complications

this year.

“It’s been a tough time,” he said

at his packing plant. “We had a

trade conflict between the Israeli

and Palestinian sides in February,

then the coronavirus came in

March and now we are dealing

with annexation.”

He worries that annexation

could require the placement of a

barrier between his packing plant

and suppliers scattered through-

out the Jordan Valley. “This issue

is creating a lot of uncertainty for

us,” he said.

Shaul Arieli, a former Israeli ne-

gotiator who specializes in maps

and borders, said that he did not

expect Israel to implement any

annexation immediately, but that

authorities could eventually de-

cide to erect a barrier separating

the Palestinian enclaves from the

rest of the valley.

Despite the overwhelming pes-

simism about the prospect of an-

nexation, some Palestinians in the

area did not rule out the possibil-

ity that it might benefit them.

Raed Bani Fadal, 35, a worker at

an Israeli date plant in the Netiv

Hagdud settlement, said annex-

ation might open the door to per-

manent residency, the status af-

forded to Palestinian residents of

East Jerusalem. He sees that as

an improvement over the current

military occupation.

“It might mean they have to pay

us higher wages and allow greater

freedom of movement,” he said.

“If I’m right, I hope they annex

right away.”

The Palestinians in the Jordan

Valley who feel most anxious

about the ongoing annexation dis-

cussions are Bedouin shepherds

— several thousand of whom live

in tin-roofed tents in encamp-

ments that Israel considers ille-

gal.

“They have been practicing an-

nexation against us since 1967,

trying to deny us all the basic

needs of life,” said Abdel Rahman

Bisharat, 71, a resident of Al Ha-

didiya, a Bedouin village that is

accessible only by a rocky dirt

road. “We now fear they will try to

expel us from our land.”

In Al Hadidiya, water is so

scarce that residents can take

showers only once a week, he said.

Israel has not said whether it

would expel shepherds in unrec-

ognized villages if it annexes the

Jordan Valley, but Mr. Arieli pre-

dicts they would likely be “the

first casualty” of the process.

Mr. Bisharat, however, said his

family would not accept reloca-

tion.

“We refuse to leave,” he said.

“We were born on this land and we

will do everything we can to stay

here.”

Palestinians in Jordan Valley Fear Annexation Would Cut Them Off

Netanyahu’s Plan

Remains Unclear

Many Palestinians in the Jordan Valley worry annexation could block them from getting to their

farmlands. At left, Israeli soldiers at a Palestinian shopping center in the Jordan Valley.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAN BALILTY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

“We now fear they will try to expel us from our land,” said Abdel Rahman Bisharat, a shepherd.

By ADAM RASGON

WASHINGTON — American
Special Operations forces used a
specially designed secret missile
to kill the head of a Qaeda affiliate
in Syria this month, dealing the
terrorist group a serious blow
with a weapon that combines me-
dieval brutality with cutting-edge
technology.
American and Qaeda officials
said on Wednesday that Khaled
al-Aruri, the de facto leader of the
Qaeda branch, called Hurras al-
Din, perished in a drone strike in
Idlib in northwest Syria on June

14. He was a Qaeda veteran whose
    jihadist career dates to the 1990s.
    How he died was even more
    striking. The modified Hellfire
    missile carried an inert warhead.
    Instead of exploding, it hurled
    about 100 pounds of metal through
    the top of Mr. al-Aruri’s car. If the
    high-velocity projectile did not kill
    him, the missile’s other feature al-
    most certainly did: six long blades
    tucked inside, which deployed
    seconds before impact to slice up
    anything in its path.
    The Hellfire variant, known as
    the R9X, was initially developed
    nearly a decade ago under pres-
    sure from President Barack

Obama to reduce civilian casu-

alties and property damage in

America’s long-running wars on

terrorism in far-flung hot spots.

The weapon, first described in

detail last year by The Wall Street

Journal, has been used perhaps a

half-dozen times in recent years,

American officials said, typically

when a senior terrorist leader has

been located but other weapons

would risk killing nearby civil-

ians.

Conventional Hellfire missiles,

with an explosive warhead of

about 20 pounds, are often used

against groups of individuals or a

so-called high-value target who is

meeting with other militants. But

when Special Operations forces

are hunting a lone leader, the R9X

now is often the weapon of choice.

American officials confirmed

the use of the unusual missile in

two specific instances, one by the

Central Intelligence Agency and

one by the military’s secretive

Joint Special Operations Com-

mand. An American military

airstrike in Yemen in January

2019 killed Jamal al-Badawi, one

of the men suspected of plotting

the deadly Qaeda bombing of the

U.S. Navy destroyer Cole in 2000.

And Al Qaeda’s second-ranking

leader, Abu al-Khayr al-Masri,

who was a son-in-law of Osama

bin Laden, died in a C.I.A.

airstrike in Idlib Province in

northwest Syria in February 2017.

Photographs of the vehicle Mr.

al-Masri was said to have been

traveling in revealed unusual de-

tails for such a strike: The vehicle

sustained no major explosive

damage, but a projectile clearly

struck it directly through its roof.

This suggested that the military

deliberately used an inert war-

head to kill its target by high-ve-

locity impact. Pentagon officials

at the time did not disclose details

about the R9X’s blades.

The British Royal Air Force

used inert precision-guided

bombs in the opening phases of

the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and

the French Air Force did the same

in Libya in 2011. Neither munition

employed the blades that the

American version later would.

Pentagon and C.I.A. represent-

atives declined to comment on

Wednesday about the use of the

R9X missile in Mr. al-Aruri’s

death.

The use of this type of missile

falls in line with the American mil-

itary’s push to use smaller muni-

tions to kill targets, made appar-

ent during the recent air cam-

paigns against the Islamic State in

Iraq and Syria in an effort to avoid

civilian casualties.

This includes the increased reli-

ance on the GBU-39, a 250-pound

small-diameter bomb used exten-

sively in the 2016 and 2017 battles

of Mosul and later Raqqa. Another

weapon that has gained popular-

ity is the advanced precision-kill

weapon system. It transforms a

small, unguided 2.75-inch rocket

with a laser-guidance kit, effec-

tively turning the weapon into an

air-launched sniper round.

But even the use of smaller,

more precise munitions has left

hundreds, if not thousands, of ci-

vilians killed by American weap-

ons during the six-year war

against the Islamic State and the

continuing air campaign in Af-

ghanistan.

The resilience of the Qaeda

branch in Syria, as well as the op-

erations of other affiliates in West

Africa, Somalia, Yemen and Af-

ghanistan, underscores the ter-

rorist group’s enduring threat de-

spite Bin Laden’s death and being

largely eclipsed in recent years by

the Islamic State as the terrorist

group of choice of global jihadis.

“Al Qaeda remains a global

force with its networks and

branches around the world,” Am-

bassador Nathan A. Sales, the

State Department’s counterter-

rorism coordinator, said in a con-

ference call with reporters on

Wednesday after releasing the de-

partment’s annual country re-

ports on terrorism.

Mr. al-Aruri, who was also

known as Abu al Qassam, was a

close companion and brother-in-

law of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the

Jordanian terrorist who headed Al

Qaeda in Mesopotamia until he

was killed by an American

airstrike in Iraq in 2006, according

to Thomas Joscelyn, a senior edi-

tor of FDD’s Long War Journal, a

website run by the Foundation for

Defense of Democracies that

tracks military strikes against

militant groups.

In 2015, Mr. al-Aruri was one of

five senior Qaeda figures freed by

Iran in exchange for an Iranian

diplomat held in Yemen. His re-

lease brought a highly experi-

enced operative back to the field,

and after his arrival in Syria he

slowly climbed the ranks to be-

come Al Qaeda’s military boss and

then the de facto leader there.

The new Qaeda branch, called

Hurras al-Din, emerged in early

2018 after several factions broke

away from a larger affiliate in Syr-

ia. It is the successor to the Khora-

san Group, a small but dangerous

organization of hardened senior

Qaeda operatives that Ayman al-

Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s leader, sent to

Syria to plot attacks against the

West.

The Khorasan Group was effec-

tively wiped out by a series of

American airstrikes several years

ago. But with as many as 2,

fighters, including seasoned lead-

ers from Jordan and Egypt, Hur-

ras al-Din is much larger and has

operated in areas where Russian

air defenses have largely shielded

them from American airstrikes

and the persistent stare of Ameri-

can surveillance planes.

Moscow dispatched military

aid and advisers to Syria in late

2015 to support the beleaguered

government of President Bashar

al-Assad.

Hurras al-Din was initially led

by Abu Hammam al-Shami, an-

other Qaeda veteran, but a United

Nations report said last year that

Mr. al-Aruri took charge of the or-

ganization at some point.

“Khaled al-Aruri was one of Al

Qaeda’s most senior figures

worldwide and a major veteran of

the cause, having begun work

with Zarqawi in the late 1980s,”

said Charles Lister, the director of

the Middle East Institute’s Syria

and Countering Terrorism and

Extremism Programs.

Besides being Al Qaeda’s pri-

mary representative in Syria, Mr.

al-Aruri was also engaged in ef-

forts to revitalize the group’s oper-

ational presence in Iraq, Turkey

and Lebanon, re-engaging old net-

works and connections that had

weakened somewhat in recent

years, Mr. Lister said.

U.S. Used Secret Weapon, Missile With Blades, to Kill Qaeda Leader in Syria

By ERIC SCHMITT

Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed
reporting from Hope, Maine.