How many of you remember Dirar Abu Sisi, the Hamas rocket scientist that the Mossad somehow found on a train in the Ukraine? It's been a few months since we heard about him, but it seems that Mr. Abu Sisi has learned how to sing, and he's been singing quite a lot lately....
The Beersheba Magistrate's Court released sections of the investigation by security forces of Abu Sisi for publication on Thursday.
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According to a report by Channel 10, during questioning, Abu Sisi described Hamas as a hierarchical organization which seeks to learn from mistakes and to constantly improve its attack capabilities against Israel.
He reportedly confessed to carrying out rocket experiments, during which projectiles were fired out to the Mediterranean Sea from Khan Younis. "The rocket fell [into the water] after 22 kilometers, thought it was supposed to fall after 30 kilometers" he said during questioning, according to Channel 10.
During the time of the experiments, Hamas was lacking material required to extend the range of the rockets. The material was later acquired through smuggling tunnels linking the Sinai Peninsula to Gaza.
According to the report, Abu Sisi expressed regret for his work on behalf of Hamas, saying, "I'm very sorry for belonging to the Muslim Brothers and Hamas, and for my activities in developing rocket ranges and setting up the Hamas military activity." Abu Sisi also said he regretted all of the information he gave to Hamas that now threatens the security of Israeli civilians, the report said.
Abu Sisi said during questioning that he received veiled death threats from senior Hamas officials when he expressed a desire to leave the organization.
Abu Sisi said that following Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009, when Hamas gunmen abandoned their positions in the face of advancing IDF troops, Hamas military commander Ahmed Jabari, who heads Hamas's military wing, and senior Hamas member Muhammad Daf concluded that the organization had failed during the conflict, and appointed Abu Sisi to help set up a military academy.
Hamas carried out an evaluation of its own performance, and found that its decision making processes had failed, and that weapons were not used correctly during battles, Abu Sisi said. It also found failures in command and management levels.
I'll bet he regrets joining Hamas now. Heh.
It sounds like there will be more installments of this. I can't wait.
"The definitive proof that Israel was behind this attack is that the rockets used by the American-made Apache helicopters are only owned by Israel in the region," the Foreign Ministry statement said.
It said remnants at the scene showed the weapon was an AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-surface missile.
The aircraft, the ministry said, had flown in from the direction of the Red Sea, scrambling Sudanese radar systems and following Port Sudan airport flight paths.
Sudan said Israel, which it considers an enemy state, was trying to derail efforts to normalise ties with Washington. The United States started the process of removing Sudan from its list of state sponsors of terror after Khartoum recognised a vote by its south to secede in July.
Confirmed: Israel behind Sudan airstrike; Saudis involved?
Time Magazine Jerusalem bureau chief Karl Vick claims to have confirmed that the IDF was behind the air strike on Wednesday at Port Sudan in which Hamas' chief arms procurement agent was allegedly killed.
And indeed the Israel Defense Force had nothing to say on Wednesday about the mysterious air strike just north of Port Sudan late Tuesday evening. But a senior military official privately confirmed the obvious. "It's not our first time there," the official told TIME, referring to a January 2009 airstrike that demolished an entire convoy near the Egyptian border, killing dozens. Both attacks took place on the preferred route for smuggling guns, missiles and mortars to the Gaza Strip and Hamas, the militant Islamist group that governs it. The route begins in Iran, a major sponsor of Hamas, runs by sea around the Arabian Peninsula to Port Sudan, then overland across the vast Sinai Desert. Somewhere along the way, according to a Western official speaking on condition of anonymity, an electronic device was attached to the shipment. Its signal guided the missile into the the vehicle as it moved north from the port Tuesday night. News reports quoted witnesses as hearing multiple explosions; secondary blasts would likely be the unidentified munition inside the car.
The Sinai has never been easily policed by Egyptian authorities,and has been even more wide-open since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak. (When a hierarchy slackens, the periphery loosens the most.) But Gilad signaled that things are tightening up, saying the military government that succeeded Mubarak is working closely with Israel on Sinai.
"We have intensive dialogue with Egyptian authorities and they are doing their best to rise to the challenges," he said. Indeed Gilad was downright ebullient about the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, referring admiringly to its "sophisticated use of power" and singling out Field Marshal Mohamad Hussain Tantawi, a close adviser to Mubarak. Israel's quite public worries about the course Egypt might take after Tahrir Square seemed a thing of the past, at least for now. "I must say I'm very much impressed by the stability of the Supreme Council," Gilad said. "I think they embody the best of Egypt."
Sudan may differ. To reach its territory, Israeli aircraft would have needed overflight permission from either Saudi Arabia or Egypt. Both border the Red Sea south of Israel, and neither is a fan of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Long experience with Egyptian meddling predisposes Khartoum to blame Cairo for a great deal, though on Wednesday its foreign minister was naming only Israel.
"This is absolutely an Israeli attack," Sudan's Foreign Minister Ali Karti told reporters. He found in the air strike evidence of a plot to keep Sudan on the State Department's list of countries that support terror.
Now wouldn't that be something if Israel had gotten permission to overfly Saudi Arabia on the way to the Sudan? JPost adds:
Israel assassinated a senior Hamas weapons smuggler late Tuesday night when it bombed a rental car in Sudan, the Al-Arabiya news channel reported on Wednesday, shedding light on the mysterious late-night air strike.
The station did not identify the two men who were killed in the strike but said that one of them was Sudanese and that the other was from another Arab country. Some reports have claimed that he was a senior Hamas operative responsible for smuggling weapons from Iran, Syria and Lebanon to the Gaza Strip.
Palestinian news source Ma'an reported an anonymous intelligence official as saying that one of the men killed in the recent attack was senior Hamas official Abdul Latif Al-Shaqr. The source added that the other man killed was a 'friend' of Shaqr's.
According to the source, Shaqr was the successor of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, the senior Hamas official who was assassinated in his hotel room in Dubai last year.
Private sources in Hamas have denied the claim that Shaqr was killed in the attack, Ma'an reported, and said that Shaqr is alive and well.
Shaqr, whose family live in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, has been previously accused of smuggling weapons to Hamas in Gaza by the IDF, Ma'an reported, and of inheriting Mabhouh's position after he was killed.
I told you all last night that he had to be al-Mabhouh's successor!
And it turns out that a little birdie named Dirar Abu Sesi has started to sing.
On Thursday, Kuwaiti newspaper Al Jarida reported that jailed Gazan engineer Dirar Abu Sisi gave Israeli intelligence 'valuable information' that led to the attack on the arms smugglers. According to the source, Abu Sisi passed along the sensitive information to Israel during his remand since he was abducted by a train in Ukraine last month.
The source also told Al Jarida that Israel received valuable information on smuggling routes and cells operating from Sudan, through Egypt, and to Gaza, from a 'network' of southern Sudanese refugees who have migrated to Israel.
We now know why the Mossad had Dirar Abu Sesi arrested in the Ukraine and hustled back to Israel. No, it wasn't because of things he knew about Gilad Shalit, although that may also be true. Dirar Abu Sesi is the Godfather of Hamas' rocket industry.
According to the indictment, Abu Sisi received his doctorate at the Kharkov Military Engineering Academy and studied under Prof. Konstantin Petrovich, an expert in Scud missile control systems.
During his studies, Abu Sisi acquired extensive knowledge in missile development, control systems, propulsion and rocket stabilization.
After returning to the Gaza Strip and parallel to his work as an engineer for the Gaza electric company, Abu Sisi was secretly recruited into Hamas by the military commander of the terrorist organization at the time, Salah Shehadeh, and began working as one of their leading engineers for short- and long-range missiles.
Abu Sisi not only developed missiles in Gaza but was also, according to the charge sheet, responsible for upgrading thousands of older rockets and increasing their range and penetration capabilities.
According to the indictment, which was filed on Monday in the Beersheba District Court, Abu Sisi was charged with membership in a terrorist organization, conspiracy to commit a crime, the production of illegal weaponry, assistance to an illegal organization, and a variety of other crimes.
During his interrogation, officials said, Abu Sisi provided valuable intelligence information on Hamas’s military wing, its different branches and the decision-making process within the terror group.
Abu Sesi was a key cog in turning Hamas from a terrorist organization into a military force.
Monday’s indictment against Abu Sisi is also unique. First, it is longer than most indictments filed in Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) investigations and goes into extreme detail – such as the exact number of centimeters of armor the anti-tank missiles he developed can penetrate – as if the prosecution or the Shin Bet felt like it needed to justify the saga behind his arrest.
Second, it provides unprecedented insight into the Hamas military wing and how it has turned into a military one would expect to see in a country – not just with brigades, battalions and special forces, but also with an in-house defense industry.
Hamas’s interest in establishing a Gaza-based weapons production capability is likely a sign of the organization’s ultimate desire to become independent one day of its patrons in Tehran and Damascus. It could also be a sign of Hamas concern that one day Israel, Egypt and the rest of the world will begin to take more effective steps to prevent arms smuggling to Gaza, meaning that its supply from Iran will slow down.
It is unclear what effect the removal of Abu Sisi from Gaza will have on Hamas and its military capabilities. Was he working on developing a new weapon for Hamas? Has he already trained replacements and successors? In addition, was this history of his – as revealed in the indictment – enough to justify an operation to capture Abu Sisi in Ukraine, as foreign reports suggest Israel did? This might have been the case. Many of the details surrounding him and his arrest are still banned for publication.
What I am wondering is why we didn't just treat him like Hamas' previous engineer, Yihye Ayash.
Let's go to the videotape.
Maybe Abu Sesi has some valuable intelligence information after all. By the way, Hamas wasn't the only one who mourned Ayash's death. So did Yasser Arafat.
Der Spiegel: Abu Sesi believed to have information about Shalit
When the Dirar Abu Sesi story broke, I told you all that the Mossad does not go around randomly kidnapping people in foreign countries, and that if they undertook this kind of operation, there must have been a reason for it. I even said that you should think in terms of Mordechai Vanunu. A story in Wednesday's Der Spiegel may shed a lot of light on why the Mossad wanted Abu Sesi.
One informant says Israel had considered Abu Sisi a high-ranking Hamas man who knows a number of secrets. "If Mossad goes to such an expense, and interrogates the man for six weeks, then he must know something Israel absolutely wants to hear," says the source, who would only speak on the condition of anonymity. If Abu Sisi was just an "irritant," he would have simply been killed.
Jerusalem may believe that Abu Sisi had information relating to Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier kidnapped four and a half years ago by Hamas, according to another source. Since Shalit, now 24, was captured, Israel and Hamas have discussed a prisoner exchange, partly with German mediation. Hamas wants 1,000 Palestinians freed from jail in exchange for his freedom. Jerusalem has not wholly given up hope of liberating him with a commando mission. But Israeli forces would have to know exactly where he's held (presumably in the Gaza Strip) -- information they appear to be hoping to obtain from Abu Sisi.
Read the whole thing. The only indication it gives of why Abu Sesi was captured was because of Shalit.
But if that's the case, the fact that it's now public knowledge will make any attempt to rescue Shalit much harder. For starters, you can be sure that if he has been held in one place the entire time, he will now be moved. I don't believe he will be killed, because he is worth more to Hamas alive than dead. But it will definitely make a rescue mission much harder.
By the way, the role of the Ukrainian intelligence services in this story is fascinating. I never would have thought that the Mossad had such good relations with them.
Israel has admitted that it is holding Dirar Abu Sesi, the chief engineer of Gaza's power plant. Israel Radio reported on Tuesday morning that Abu Sesi is being held at Ashkelon's Shikma prison. Beyond that, there is a gag order on the case. Other reports have indicated that Abu Sesi was abducted from a train in the Ukraine where he had gone with his Ukrainian wife and six children to seek Ukrainian citizenship. This is from the first link.
Abu Sisi is the manager of the only power plant in the Gaza Strip. He is not known to have any direct ties with Hamas or other terrorist organizations, although it is likely that his senior position was the result of political affiliation.
In interviews to foreign reporters, Abu Sisi’s wife Veronika, blamed the kidnapping on the Mossad, claiming they did it to sabotage the Gazan power plant and that he was being held at the Shikma Prison in Ashkelon. She denied that he had any ties to Hamas.
Little is known about the circumstances surrounding Abu Sisi’s disappearance during a visit to Kiev with his family, but his sister Suzanne Abu Sisi, 45, told Reuters her brother had been abducted from a train in Ukraine last month, then taken to an Israeli prison.
“Friends there told us Dirar had been seized by six people who had abducted him from the train en route between Kharkhov and Kiev,” she told Reuters. “We know now that he is in prison in Israel, so they were the ones who abducted him. We do not know why they did it.”
Suzanne Abu Sisi, who lives in Gaza, said her brother had gone to Ukraine with his Ukrainian wife and six children to apply for citizenship there.
The Mossad does not go around kidnapping people for no reason. Think Mordechai Vanunu, another person who was kidnapped by the Mossad overseas. I am sure that there is much more that we don't know about this story than what we do know.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
How many of you remember Dirar Abu Sisi, the Hamas rocket scientist that the Mossad somehow found on a train in the Ukraine? It's been a few months since we heard about him, but it seems that Mr. Abu Sisi has learned how to sing, and he's been singing quite a lot lately.... 
