FROM DEBKA INTELLIGENCE FILES Hezbollah, al-Qaida

Israel shares intelligence documents with U.S. ahead of U.N.’s probe

Posted: April 27, 2002

Editor’s note: DEBKAfile’s electronic news publication is a news-cum-analysis live wire, online round the clock seven days a week. A weekly edition,DEBKA-Net-Weekly, is now available through WorldNetDaily.com. Drawing on DEBKAfile’s unique sources, analytical talents and forward-looking insights, it is presented as a compact, intelligence-angled weekly package. It is available as a direct e-mail feed or via the Internet.

(c) 2002 WorldNetDaily.com

Intelligence gleaned from the Jenin refugee camp suggests Israel’s military operation aided the U.S. in its war on terror. The intelligence, transferred earlier in the week to Washington, consisted of materials that Israeli forces collected during their eight-day stay in Jenin. According to military sources, the materials reveal the camp as being secretly governed by Hezbollah and al-Qaida terrorists plotting attacks against American cities.

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 U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan goes to work tomorrow. Israeli officials put little faith into the bona fides of U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan and his fact-finding team. To offset hostile findings, Israel has set up three lines of defense:

1. An information campaign shedding light on the credibility and objectivity of the U.N. panel members.

2. Handover of intelligence data gathered in the Jenin camp to Washington to ensure its proper exposure.

3. Pressure on the U.N. secretary to include intelligence and military observers qualified to evaluate intelligence evidence in his fact-finding panel.

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 U.N. Security Council, if such a motion is based on negative findings by the fact-finding delegation.

Military sources reveal some of the contents of these intelligence documents include 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 against 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 U.S. 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 Washington as proof of Arafat’s involvement in recruiting “martyrs”.

A third archive shows the Jenin camp as being secretly governed by Lebanese Hezbollah and al-Qaida 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.