Israel Mystery: Who Carried out the Bus Attack in Eilat? (Vick)

Karl Vick writes for Time magazine:

A month after an unusual terror attack killed eight Israelis along a desert highway approaching the Red Sea, the incident remains shrouded in mystery, especially in Gaza, where Israeli officials insist the complex, military-style attack was orchestrated but where no group has taken responsibility. "Usually the problem is more than one group takes credit after a successful operation," says Taheri Al-Nunu, a spokesman for Hamas, the militant group that governs Gaza. Hamas had immediately denied knowledge of the attack, and hurriedly surveyed the other militant groups operating in the enclave. "All of them denied it."

Among them was the Popular Resistance Committees, the group Israel almost immediately blamed for the attack, and promptly launched what it called a reprisal strike. Before the fighting was finished in the desert outside the resort city of Eilat, a missile from an Israeli drone exploded outside a house in Rafah, near the Egyptian border. The PRC's top commander and two aides were killed, as well as a two-year-old child.

Afterward, the group continued to deny responsibility - also unusual in a society that celebrates lives lost opposing the Israeli occupation. As a senior Hamas official put it, with a frown: "After their leaders were killed, you would expect people to be proud."

Israeli security officials tell TIME that the link to the PRC was as clear as the orders they monitored in real time from Gaza to the Sinai Peninsula where the militants waited in ambush. In a new detail, one official states that two of the five bodies recovered after the fighting have been identified as Gaza residents. The official did not say how the identity was confirmed, which will do little to end speculation about the incident.

"If the Israelis have any proof, give it," says Ahmed Yusuf, a former Hamas official who now runs a Gaza think tank. "I met with these people for the Popular Resistance. They said, 'We want to distance ourselves from what happened in Eilat and wondered why they were threatening us.'"

Pointing toward Gaza was paraphernalia found at the scene - flex-cuffs and chloroform - indicating the militants hoped to kidnap an Israeli. Kidnapping is a primary goal for militants given Israel's history of releasing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a hostage.

Pointing away from Gaza is the absence, apart from the funerals of the PRC leaders, of any sign of mourning for martyred sons --- almost impossible to hide in so small a place --- and the relative sophistication of the attack itself, "a very complex, very strange operation," in the words of one militant. As many as a dozen attackers laid a midday ambush Aug. 18 on an Israeli highway that parallels the border with the Sinai Peninsula, a part of Egypt --- accessible from Gaza - that has been especially lawless since police abandoned their post with the downfall of Hosni Mubarak. Assailants fired automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades (originally thought to be missiles) at civilian cars and busses. One bus was incinerated when an attacker, moving with what witnesses described as frantic speed, climbed aboard and detonated a suicide vest; only the driver had been on board.

When Israeli troops arrived, militants detonated explosives buried beside the road, and returned Israeli fire for hours from two sites a mile or two apart. The attackers were so persistent, or well-trained, that one of the Israeli dead, an officer in the police anti-terror task force, was killed after dark. The Israeli defense minister's roadside press conference was abruptly adjourned when fire erupted again.

"I mean, the operation was still on when they assassinated our people," says a spokesman for the PRC who goes by Abu Mujahed. An amiable man in his 30s, he wears smartly pressed slacks and an open shirt as he takes questions on a grassy yard in Khan Younis, the next town east from Rafah. "The way they controlled and managed to fight for hours, it shows that whoever's behind it has a very strong organization structure. Its like they have a military background and experience in how to do this."

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