Mission: Intercept Suicide Bombers

Terrorized by human bombs, Israel needs human shields.

That’s why Sgt. Elinor Uzan volunteered for the Recon 7 unit of the Israeli border police. Her specialty: subduing suicide bombers.

The baby-faced Uzan has freckles, orange-blond curls and an irrepressible smile. Armed with a Jericho semiautomatic pistol and wearing street clothes, the 19-year-old patrols malls, nightclub districts and other public places that are the bloodstained home front of the Mideast conflict.

She scans crowds for a heavy coat, a sweaty brow, whitened knuckles and other signs of an imminent confrontation with walking death. When the moment comes, she will do the opposite of what most people would do. She will attack, trying to overpower the bomber before he or she turns her into another victim.

“Either you respond or you freeze,” Uzan said. “A lot of people are depending on you. It’s very hard to train for this. How do you train for something like that? You work mainly on your mind, how fast you are, how alert you are.”

A barrage of bombings last month gave the unit an extensive dossier of carnage to study. Training intensely for close-quarters combat, the officers also learn everything they can about the nihilistic psychology and sophisticated methodology of the enemy. And sometimes, intelligence from informants in the West Bank helps.

A suicide bomber killed eight people on a bus near Haifa on Wednesday, ending a weeklong lull in bomb attacks on civilians during Israel’s military offensive in the West Bank. Israel says it launched the operation in Palestinian territory to stop an onslaught of suicide bombings against civilians that killed 85 people and wounded 672 between Jan. 22 and April 1.

In today’s Israel, the border is everywhere. Arabs and Jews live close together, glaring at one another across boulevards, walls and barbed-wire fences. Street checkpoints, military foot patrols and cruising police cars have multiplied in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and other cities.

To beef up defenses, the national police force has yanked detectives, supervisors and cadets off assignments and sent them on street patrol. And the border police, a force with a two-fisted reputation, is changing roles.

The border agency has never patrolled international boundaries in a conventional sense. Rather, it has been a paramilitary force responding to demonstrations and riots by Arabs, as well as handling rural law enforcement and occasional military duties.

Instead of facing stone-throwing youths, units such as Recon 7 rove the internal front line with the ultimate--and unenviable--tactical challenge of detecting and intercepting suicide bombers.

Uzan belongs to one of a number of specialized units that work around the nation. Sometimes in uniform and sometimes in plainclothes, her 40-officer unit patrols an area north of Tel Aviv that encompasses Netanya, the coastal resort where a bomber killed 27 people at a Passover dinner in a hotel--and triggered the military drive into the West Bank. The units work in teams of three or four officers.

The mission makes being a member of the SWAT team or the bomb squad seem relatively safe. At least bombs don’t struggle and explode themselves at will; and gunmen can only kill one person at a time.

“If a terrorist comes to a scene and shoots, there is a firefight,” said Superintendent Shlomi Abukasi, the commander of the unit. “You have a couple of seconds of shooting. But in the case of a suicide bomber, you don’t have that window of time.”

Some Have Volunteered

Abukasi, 36, is of Jewish Moroccan descent. Like U.S. Border Patrol agents, about half of whom are Latino, the Israeli border police force attracts working-class immigrants. The officers who trained Tuesday with pistols and M-16s at a firing range in a rock quarry in this semirural area east of Tel Aviv came from a variety of backgrounds, including Ethiopian, Kurdish and Druze Arabs. Some officers in Recon 7 have volunteered for the duty, but not all.

Sitting on a rock by the firing range, the lean and quiet Abukasi looked unwaveringly alert. Asked about his mind-set on the street, he said: “It’s imagination and memory. My imagination and memory work together. I imagine a terrorist exploding, the damage that’s done. When I go after a terrorist, I imagine what will happen when I blow up. And my memory recalls all the experiences from the calls I have worked on, the little pieces of bodies everywhere.”

Although suicide bombing seems individualistic and anarchic, each attack is the product of a network. Experts prepare exploding belts and vests in secret laboratories, 15 of which have been discovered by Israeli troops during the West Bank operation. Accomplices often drive bombers into Israeli cities from Palestinian areas.

The involvement of a terrorist structure gives Israeli forces a better chance of detecting a plot in the making. Sometimes intelligence agents provide police and private security companies with photos and names of suspected bombers and anticipated times they might strike.

Even if officers are on the lookout for a known face, the Recon 7 unit faces a profound dilemma when it comes to using deadly force.

“Shooting is a problem,” Abukasi said. “Because if you make a mistake, you can’t turn back the clock.” It’s a tightrope between under-reaction and overreaction. In one incident, Uzan said, an Arab suspect seemed like the real thing: He acted nervous. He carried a big bag. When challenged, he made a move to flee, then reached into his bag as the officers aimed their guns.

Although the officers were as terrified as the suspect, they did not fire. It turned out that he was just reaching into the bag to pull out his ID card.

“He was very close to being killed,” Uzan said.

Similarly, shouting an alert in a crowded place could be problematic. It could cause panic, and many Israelis pack guns.

Traffic stops are another nightmare. Checkpoints are especially vulnerable; an officer died in Jerusalem last week when he stopped a car and a bomber inside immolated them both.

The instinct is to keep a suspect at a distance, Uzan said. But if you stay too far back, you can’t see or hear enough to make decisions. Officers take turns, some at a distance and one approaching the car to ask questions and examine documents.

“We flip a coin,” Uzan said, chuckling.

Whether the Recon 7 officers respond to a call or spot a suspect on their own, the grimmest scenario is the most likely one: stealthily jumping the bomber and grabbing his or her hands.

On one occasion, Uzan and her team rushed a bona fide bomber. The explosives he was carrying were not yet wired to go off, she said. But that didn’t reduce the adrenaline flow or the pride she felt afterward--the reasons she signed up in the first place.

“I’m enjoying it,” Uzan said. “I know I save a lot of lives. My father is very, very proud. My mother is very nervous and worried.”

Police Criticized

Sometimes, the aggressive police response brings criticism. On March 8, a border police unit intercepted Mahmoud Salah, 23, and another Palestinian in a housing project in the Beit Hanina area of Jerusalem.

Salah wore explosives strapped to his torso and was on his way to commit an attack in a Jewish area, according to police and to the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an extremist group to which he belonged.

During the excruciating incident, which was recorded by a photographer, at least three police officers struggled with Salah, held him face down and pulled off his shirt and pants. A bomb squad expert arrived and tried to defuse the explosive, but Salah rolled around trying to press the trigger button on his stomach against the cement, according to police.

Finally, the officers shot Salah in the head. Palestinian activists accused the officers of executing him in cold blood, saying he was under control when he was shot.

Israeli police, however, said the officers fired because they feared he would ignite the explosives. They argued that police hope to capture suspected bombers alive to assist their investigations.

A prosecutor’s inquiry found no wrongdoing and the case was closed, according to Gil Kleiman, a national police spokesman.

Matter-of-fact heroism has accompanied some of the more than 35 bombing attempts this year. On March 7, a man with a backpack walked into a popular cafe in Jerusalem’s German Colony neighborhood. A customer thought he was suspicious and pointed him out to restaurant employees. Realizing that the man had a triggering device in his hand, the customer, a security guard and a waiter pushed him outside and wrestled the would-be bomber down. It was the guard’s first day on duty.

The war at home has caused unprecedented demand for security guards.

“It’s madness,” said Drol Chayu of Shahaf Security in Haifa. “Everybody wants guards, armed guards. We don’t have enough people. And we don’t have enough guns. There has never been this frequency, never so many guards for restaurants and pubs and streets.”

Security guards have become a fixture outside establishments such as the Hillel Cafe, a street-corner coffeehouse on Jaffa Street in downtown Jerusalem.

Propped against a stool in the doorway with a rifle slung over his shoulder, security guard AmotzSegal watches the urban landscape through wraparound sunglasses: soldiers on foot patrol, citizens with pistols jammed in their waistbands, pedestrians walking quickly and wasting no time window-shopping.

Segal, 22, recently finished his military service after three years in a combat unit that saw action in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Then he went to work for $4 an hour as a sentry on Jaffa Street, which has been a major bombing target. The sidewalks are half-empty.

The job requires constant threat assessment, Segal said. The idea is to spot a potential attacker before he gets too close and stop him at gunpoint.

Guards are a deterrent because terrorists want to get inside, where it’s likely they will kill more people, Chayu said.

Small comfort for the minimum-wage human shield. Just having an espresso on a sunny day has become an act of patriotism and daring, Segal said.

“He’s braver than me,” Segal said, nodding at a customer at an outdoor table. “I’ve got a weapon and he doesn’t.”

Many Israelis now stay home for safety’s sake; video rentals have soared. But Uzan, who spends her days stalking death, is having none of it. At work or at play, she stands up for her country.

“I try to go out more,” Uzan said cheerfully. “I don’t have much free time, but when I do, I say: ‘Let’s go dance. Let’s go to a restaurant.’ I don’t want them to stop our lives.”