Yahya Ayyash… the architect of the resistance and the nightmare of the occupation

“They can uproot my body from Palestine, but I want to plant something in the people that they cannot uproot.”

(Yahya Ayyash)

On May 13, 2021 (1), in the midst of the Saif al-Quds battle between Gaza and the Israeli occupation forces, the Al-Qassam Brigades launched a guided missile that the occupation had never known before, with which it bombed the town of “Ilot,” adjacent to the Israeli Ramon Airport in the south of the occupied territories. Then, a statement was issued by “Abu Ubaida” (2), the official spokesman for “Al-Qassam”, which contained two related pieces of information: the second was that the bombing was carried out with the missile that has the highest destructive power among the resistance missiles, and that it was launched in retaliation for the assassination of Al-Qassam leaders and engineers by the occupation. The first information is that the missile bears the name “Ayyash 250,” named after the martyr engineer “Yahya Ayyash,” who was assassinated by Israeli intelligence in 1996.

With a range of up to 250 km, “Ayyash 250” announced that all the occupied territories were subject to the range of the resistance’s missiles, in a symbolism linking the new weapon to the man who made the Palestinian resistance a weapon and a strong force against its enemy. He is Abu Al-Baraa, “Yahya Abdul Latif Sati Mahmoud Ayyash,” an engineering graduate. Electrician at Birzeit University, and the engineer of the most important bombings in the Al-Qassam Brigades during the first half of the 1990s, and the number one wanted by the occupying state until he obtained martyrdom, and the man who transferred the Palestinian resistance to a major qualitative shift through strategies of car bombs and martyrdom explosions that the occupation had never experienced before, to offer us a life – Although it is short, it is rich in chapters that deserve to be told. With the current war between the Palestinian resistance factions and the occupation army on the outskirts of the besieged Gaza Strip, the emergence of booby-trapped devices, and the qualitative development of resistance weapons, Ayyash’s name is clearly present as one of the engineers and leaders who established the armed struggle against the occupation.

From the countryside to the city

On Sunday, March 6, 1966, in the village of Rafat in Nablus, Sheikh Abdul Latif Sati was receiving his firstborn, whom he named “Yahya” after the name of the Prophet of God, Yahya bin Zakariya, peace be upon them both. The young man grew up in a simple country house to religious parents, who instilled in him the elements of religiosity that made his personality calm and balanced from a young age (3).

From the first moments of his primary school, “Yahya” showed signs of intelligence and scientific genius, to the point that he was beyond the capabilities of his class by a year or two, according to his father’s description (4). Yahya obtained his high school diploma from Bidya School with a general average of 92.8%, and an average of 95% in physics and mathematics (5), and then the doors of the College of Engineering were opened to this exceptional mind.

In behavior consistent with his righteous and humble personality, “Yahya” refused to join the University of Jordan or Yarmouk University – despite his qualifications to join them – in order not to be separated from his parents, and in order to save the maximum possible amount of his studies expenses, and so he joined the Faculty of Engineering (Electrical Department) at Birzeit University ( 6), in a choice that had the greatest impact on the future of the budding engineer. At the annual reception in 1984, Ayyash met students from the “Islamic Bloc” at the university, which was the student wing of the Hamas movement (before the movement was officially founded in 1987), and introduced himself to them, and they showed interest in him.

Yahya Ayyash between his mother and father.. pic.twitter.com/v6jGS4hMYK

– Abu Malak (@Abuhawash10) November 24, 2019

Ayyash quickly became involved with the students of the Islamic Bloc and participated with them in various political events and student protests against the occupation. He gained a notable position in his new surroundings, and in his second year of study he became a member of one of the Muslim Brotherhood families in Ramallah, employing his father’s car to serve the Islamic movement with great diligence, until The Palestinian factions considered him the sheikh of the Brotherhood in his village of Rafat (7). The racist abuse of the occupation forces and its practices towards the Palestinians constituted the greatest motivation for Yahya to leave the circle of initial protest and demonstrations to another circle in which the act of resistance would be more eloquent and more severe against the occupation, especially since his family history comes from a family with a struggle past since the days of the British Mandate over Palestine (8). .

From stones to bomb

The writer, engineer Ghassan Doar, mentions in his book about “Ayyash” (9) that despite the great involvement of the “Hamas” movement and its followers in the first intifada, the first four years of this intifada are considered the most mysterious years in “Ayyash’s” life, as he was resisting during them. Individual operations that no one knows anything about. Ayyash did not graduate until after the Intifada, specifically in 1992, the same year in which he joined the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades – the military arm of the Hamas movement – and translated his suggestions to his comrades in the Islamic Bloc into a living reality. Ayyash, the student, always referred to the use of force in the struggle for the Palestinian cause (10), which is what Ayyash, the engineer, took the pledge to achieve.

In 1987, the first Intifada – or the Stone Intifada – broke out after a settler ran over a group of Palestinian workers (11). The uprising became “Ayyash’s” gateway to military work with the Al-Qassam Brigades, and according to engineer “Abdul Hakim Hanini” (12), one of the founders of Al-Qassam, “Yahya’s” passion for science and his constant knowledge of the contents of the university library led him to research on the gunpowder industry, where he admired He was enthusiastic about the matter, and found in preparing gunpowder from its primary components an outlet to overcome the scarcity of the resistance’s military capabilities. Then he presented the idea to the leaders of the “Al-Qassam”, including “Zaher Jabareen” (13), currently a member of the Hamas political bureau, and it received approval and encouragement.

From raw materials such as sulfur, fertilizer, and charcoal, the exceptional engineer began creating his explosive mixture, along with developing the electrical circuits needed to make explosives, exploiting his unique scientific and mental reserve – with the testimony of his peers – to provide the first explosive weapon for the Palestinian resistance. After the failure of the first experiment, the second experiment produced a result that impressed everyone who saw it. They even began to say “Allahu Akbar” and hug each other as if they owned the entire world, as “Jabbareen” narrates.

After that, the Qassami manufacturing team set about making the explosives that Ayyash had invented. During the years of the Intifada, resistance with stones turned into a different kind of resistance, which included car bombs alongside gatherings of Israelis, and martyrdom-indulgence operations that had a profound effect in destabilizing the morale of the occupation. Speaking about Ayyash, the prominent Qassam leader Saleh Al-Arouri (14) said that when the enemy sees the people of truth whom he is fighting going to death by choice, he will find no escape from psychological defeat.

The Qassam operations continued under the supervision of the engineer who became the most wanted by Israeli intelligence, until the massacre of the Ibrahimi Mosque occurred on Ramadan 15, 1414 AH / February 25, 1994 AD, when the Zionist doctor Baruch Goldstein stormed the Ibrahimi Mosque under the eyes of the occupation soldiers, who closed the mosque’s gates to prevent… The worshipers managed to escape, before Goldstein opened fire on the worshipers, killing 29 worshipers and wounding 15 others.

The worshipers attacked the killer doctor and killed him, but this did not prevent the Zionist security from exacerbating the numbers of martyrs and wounded with extreme acts of violence and terrorism, which made “Yahya” determined to avenge his family for this murder, and so the response came quickly on April 6 of the same year, when Resistant Raed Zakarneh advanced with his car bomb towards the central bus station in the city of Afula, as Ayyash had planned. At the moment the passengers began to enter the bus, “Raed” overtook the bus and stopped his explosive-laden car at the front of it. Only seconds passed until the sounds of explosions filled the street, killing eight settlers on its way (14).

One week later, on the 13th of the same month, the Hadera operation (15) was carried out, carried out by the guerrilla “Ammar Amarna”, which killed 7 Israelis and wounded dozens, then the Tel Aviv operation (16) was carried out on the 19th of December 1994, carried out by “Saleh Nazzal”. , which killed 22 Israelis and injured more than 45 others, in addition to material losses amounting to two million and 300 thousand dollars, and the public uproar that demanded the resignation of the Prime Minister of the occupying state, “Yitzhak Rabin” (17).

All of these operations were sponsored by Yahya Ayyash and his four-member team consisting of Zaher Jabareen, Ali Assi, and Adnan Marei, who were financing the operations from their own pockets. Ayyash was even forced to sell his wife, Umm al-Baraa’s, gold in order to finance the armed struggle (18). But these operations and others like them made “Ayyash” the top priority of the Israeli intelligence and its government in order to liquidate him.

martyr

“Ayyash is alive, don’t say Ayyash is dead… Will the Nile or the Euphrates River dry up!”

(Abdulaziz Al-Rantisi)

As Ayyash’s star shone in the 1990s, the Israeli security services – with direct follow-up from Prime Minister Rabin – did not leave an opportunity to easily pursue the “mercurial” engineer, whose whereabouts and movements no one knew. As the persecution and persecution of everyone related to him intensified, especially his family, whose house was destroyed during the search for it, the engineer decided to leave the West Bank for Gaza. Where is the center of Hamas influence.

During his trip to Gaza, “Doar” mentioned that the number one wanted man in the occupied territories left the West Bank in a way that the Israeli security services could not find an explanation for, at a time when thousands of soldiers, border guards, and police were on alert to arrest him. According to what was narrated by his son, “Al-Baraa” (19), “Ayyash” moved from the West Bank to Gaza in a box hidden in a food truck, only to escape before the eyes of the occupation without them seeing him.

From neighborhood to neighborhood, and from house to house, the engineer’s journey in hiding was arduous and exhausting. Despite this, operations against the occupation continued without stopping. With the intense security pressure on his family in the West Bank, Ayyash sent for his wife, Hiyam Ayyash, and his son, Al-Baraa, to be with him in Gaza. Israeli intelligence became aware of the possibility of Ayyash being in Gaza, and began an attempt to assassinate him from afar.

Among the houses in which Ayyash was hiding was the house of his friend “Osama Hammad” in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, and that’s when “Kamal,” his friend’s uncle, the businessman who had a close relationship – according to his narration (20) – with the Palestinian intelligence official, Major General, recognized him. Musa Arafat,” which later led him to get to know some senior figures in Israeli intelligence (Shin Bet), who asked him to give a cell phone packed with explosives to Yahya in any way.

On the promised day, Yahya rushed to his friend Osama’s house to call his father and give him the news of his new baby, “Abdul Latif,” whose name was later changed to Yahya after his father was killed. The Shin Bet disrupted the line and forced him to use the phone that Kamal had brought to him (21). During his phone call with his father on the morning of Friday, January 5, 1996, an Israeli helicopter was flying near the source of the sound in order to control the explosion of the phone as soon as it recognized Yahya’s voice. Only moments passed until the mobile phone issued a sound that the residents of the entire street heard and rushed after it. Hurry home.

It was a loud explosion that shook the neighborhood, and even all of Palestine. The complex process that Yitzhak Rabin himself carried out ended after 4 years (22), with a final call between the father and the child. The SIM card and the phone exploded, and the story of the engineer who deprived Israeli security leaders of rest for years ended, but this engineer seems to have left behind a legacy that is difficult to disappear and forget.

The death of Ayyash left a profound impact on the souls of the Palestinians and the resistance. Tens of thousands of Palestinians attended his funeral, a strike spread throughout the cities of Jerusalem and Ramallah, and pictures of the martyred engineer were plastered on the walls in the streets, in addition to the marches and demonstrations that clashed with the Israeli security forces in a true and tremendous expression of the magnitude of Public outrage over the assassination of a man considered by many to be a living “legend.” As for Ayyash’s relics, they are in the hands of the resistance today. They are developing them day after day and using them to destroy the enemy’s fortresses with tons of explosives, which before the “Engineer’s Revolution” were merely stones in the hands of angry people.

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Sources

1. Hours after flights were transferred to it, Al-Qassam bombed Ramon Airport and international airlines canceled their flights to Israel.
2. Abu Ubaida – The military spokesman for the Al-Qassam Brigades announces the launch of the Ayyash 250 missile with a longer range│Special coverage.
3. Ghassan Doar, The Engineer: The Story of the Symbolic Martyr Yahya Ayyash.
4. Interview in Abeer Magazine (Jerusalem), Issue 42, January 1996, p. 29.
5. Ghassan Doar, The Engineer: The Story of the Symbolic Martyr Yahya Ayyash.
6. Interview in Al-Watan newspaper (Gaza), issue 14, 3/9/1995, p. 6
7. Ghassan Doar, The Engineer: The Story of the Symbolic Martyr Yahya Ayyash.
8. The Jordanian Brigade, Issue No. 1185, January 24, 1996, p. 19.
9. Ghassan Doar, The Engineer: The Story of the Symbolic Martyr Yahya Ayyash.
10. Same source.
11. 1,555 Palestinians were martyred, and the policy of “breaking bones” took place… 35 years after the Stone Intifada.
12. Watch the era | Abdul Hakim Hanini (2) The beginning of military action in the West Bank
13. Same source
14. Markets, Issue No. 803, February 12, 1996, p. 14.
15. Al-Sabil, Issue No. 119, 27//, 1996, p. 16.
16. Palestine Muslim Magazine, Issue Two, Year, February 14, 1996, p. 15.
17. Al-Sabil, Issue No. 54, 11/8/1994, p. 12.
18. Samuel M. Katz, The Hunt for the Engineer: How Israeli Agents Tracked the Hamas Master Bomber
19. Documentary: Engineer of Horror – Yahya Ayyash
20. For the first time after 22 years, the agent who assassinated Yahya Ayyash appears on the media
21. The assassination of Yahya Ayyash: Details revealed by an Israeli agent
22. Al-Hadath (Jordan), Issue No. 28, January 10, 1996, p. 8.