WikiLeaks: Israel’s secret hotline to the man tipped to replace Mubarak

By Tim Ross, Christopher Hope, Steven Swinford and Adrian Blomfield

The new vice-president of Egypt, Omar Suleiman, is a long-standing favourite of Israel’s who spoke daily to the Tel Aviv government via a secret “hotline” to Cairo, leaked documents disclose.

Omar Suleiman, left, was Israel’s preferred candidate to replace President Mubarak according to secret cables released to The Daily Telegraph by WikiLeaks

Mr Suleiman, who is widely tipped to take over from Hosni Mubarak as president, was named as Israel’s preferred candidate for the job after discussions with American officials in 2008.

As a key figure working for Middle East peace, he once suggested that Israeli troops would be “welcome” to invade Egypt to stop weapons being smuggled to Hamas terrorists in neighbouring Gaza.

The details, which emerged in secret files obtained by WikiLeaks and passed to The Daily Telegraph, come after Mr Suleiman began talks with opposition groups on the future for Egypt’s government.

On Saturday, Mr Suleiman won the backing of Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, to lead the “transition” to democracy after two weeks of demonstrations calling for President Mubarak to resign.

David Cameron, the Prime Minister, spoke to Mr Suleiman yesterday and urged him to take “bold and credible steps” to show the world that Egypt is embarking on an “irreversible, urgent and real” transition.

Leaked cables from American embassies in Cairo and Tel Aviv disclose the close co-operation between Mr Suleiman and the US and Israeli governments as well as diplomats’ intense interest in likely successors to the ageing President Mubarak, 83.

The documents highlight the delicate position which the Egyptian government seeks to maintain in Middle East politics, as a leading Arab nation with a strong relationship with the US and Israel. By 2008, Mr Suleiman, who was head of the foreign intelligence service, had become Israel’s main point of contact in the Egyptian government.

David Hacham, a senior adviser from the Israeli Ministry of Defence, told the American embassy in Tel Aviv that a delegation led by Israel’s defence minister, Ehud Barak had been impressed by Mr Suleiman, whose name is spelled “Soliman” in some cables.

But Mr Hacham was “shocked” by President Mubarak’s “aged appearance and slurred speech”.

The cable, from August 2008, said: “Hacham was full of praise for Soliman, however, and noted that a ‘hot line’ set up between the MOD and Egyptian General Intelligence Service is now in daily use.

“Hacham noted that the Israelis believe Soliman is likely to serve as at least an interim President if Mubarak dies or is incapacitated.” The Tel Aviv diplomats added: “We defer to Embassy Cairo for analysis of Egyptian succession scenarios, but there is no question that Israel is most comfortable with the prospect of Omar Soliman.”

Elsewhere the documents disclose that Mr Suleiman was stung by Israeli criticism of Egypt’s inability to stop arms smugglers transporting weapons to Palestinian militants in Gaza. At one point he suggested that Israel send troops into the Egyptian border region of Philadelphi to “stop the smuggling”.

“In their moments of greatest frustration, [Egyptian Defence Minister] Tantawi and Soliman each have claimed that the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] would be ‘welcome’ to re-invade Philadelphi, if the IDF thought that would stop the smuggling,” the cable said.

The files suggest that Mr Suleiman wanted Hamas “isolated”, and thought Gaza should “go hungry but not starve”.

“We have a short time to reach peace,” he told US diplomats. “We need to wake up in the morning with no news of terrorism, no explosions, and no news of more deaths.”

Yesterday, Hosni Mubarak’s control of Egypt’s state media, a vital lynchpin of his 30-year presidency, started to slip as the country’s largest-circulation newspaper declared its support for the uprising.

Hoping to sap the momentum from street protests demanding his overthrow, the president has instructed his deputy to launch potentially protracted negotiations with secular and Islamist opposition parties. The talks continued for a second day yesterday without yielding a significant breakthrough.

But Mr Mubarak was dealt a significant setback as the state-controlled Al-Ahram, Egypt’s second oldest newspaper and one of the most famous publications in the Middle East, abandoned its long-standing slavish support for the regime.

In a front-page leading article, the newspaper hailed the “nobility” of the “revolution” and demanded the government embark on irreversible constitutional and legislative changes.

Not guilty. The Israeli captain who emptied his rifle into a Palestinian schoolgirl

• Officer ignored warnings that teenager was terrified
• Defence says ‘confirming the kill’ standard practice

Chris McGreal in Jerusalem

An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday.

The soldier, who has only been identified as “Captain R”, was charged with relatively minor offences for the killing of Iman al-Hams who was shot 17 times as she ventured near an Israeli army post near Rafah refugee camp in Gaza a year ago.

The manner of Iman’s killing, and the revelation of a tape recording in which the captain is warned that she was just a child who was “scared to death”, made the shooting one of the most controversial since the Palestinian intifada erupted five years ago even though hundreds of other children have also died.

After the verdict, Iman’s father, Samir al-Hams, said the army never intended to hold the soldier accountable.

“They did not charge him with Iman’s murder, only with small offences, and now they say he is innocent of those even though he shot my daughter so many times,” he said. “This was the cold-blooded murder of a girl. The soldier murdered her once and the court has murdered her again. What is the message? They are telling their soldiers to kill Palestinian children.”

The military court cleared the soldier of illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and perverting the course of justice by asking soldiers under his command to alter their accounts of the incident.

Capt R’s lawyers argued that the “confirmation of the kill” after a suspect is shot was a standard Israeli military practice to eliminate terrorist threats.

Following the verdict, Capt R burst into tears, turned to the public benches and said: “I told you I was innocent.”

The army’s official account said that Iman was shot for crossing into a security zone carrying her schoolbag which soldiers feared might contain a bomb. It is still not known why the girl ventured into the area but witnesses described her as at least 100 yards from the military post which was in any case well protected.

A recording of radio exchanges between Capt R and his troops obtained by Israeli television revealed that from the beginning soldiers identified Iman as a child.

In the recording, a soldier in a watchtower radioed a colleague in the army post’s operations room and describes Iman as “a little girl” who was “scared to death”. After soldiers first opened fire, she dropped her schoolbag which was then hit by several bullets establishing that it did not contain explosive. At that point she was no longer carrying the bag and, the tape revealed, was heading away from the army post when she was shot.

Although the military speculated that Iman might have been trying to “lure” the soldiers out of their base so they could be attacked by accomplices, Capt R made the decision to lead some of his troops into the open. Shortly afterwards he can be heard on the recording saying that he has shot the girl and, believing her dead, then “confirmed the kill”.

“I and another soldier … are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill … Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her … I also confirmed the kill. Over,” he said.

Palestinian witnesses said they saw the captain shoot Iman twice in the head, walk away, turn back and fire a stream of bullets into her body.

On the tape, Capt R then “clarifies” to the soldiers under his command why he killed Iman: “This is commander. Anything that’s mobile, that moves in the [security] zone, even if it’s a three-year-old, needs to be killed.”

At no point did the Israeli troops come under attack.

The prosecution case was damaged when a soldier who initially said he had seen Capt R point his weapon at the girl’s body and open fire later told the court he had fabricated the story.

Capt R claimed that he had not fired the shots at the girl but near her. However, Dr Mohammed al-Hams, who inspected the child’s body at Rafah hospital, counted numerous wounds. “She has at least 17 bullets in several parts of the body, all along the chest, hands, arms, legs,” he told the Guardian shortly afterwards. “The bullets were large and shot from a close distance. The most serious injuries were to her head. She had three bullets in the head. One bullet was shot from the right side of the face beside the ear. It had a big impact on the whole face.”

The army’s initial investigation concluded that the captain had “not acted unethically”. But after some of the soldiers under his command went to the Israeli press to give a different version, the military police launched a separate investigation after which he was charged.

Capt R claimed that the soldiers under his command were out to get him because they are Jewish and he is Druze.

The transcript

The following is a recording of a three-way conversation that took place between a soldier in a watchtower, an army operations room and Capt R, who shot the girl

From the watchtower [three-way conversation between watchtower soldier, the operations room in another location, and finally, Captain R, the officer on the ground near watchtower “It’s a little girl. She’s running defensively eastward.” “Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?” “A girl about 10, she’s behind the embankment, scared to death.” “I think that one of the positions took her out.” “I and another soldier … are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill … Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her … I also confirmed the kill. Over.”

From the operations room “Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?”

Watchtower “A girl about 10, she’s behind the embankment, scared to death.”

A few minutes later, Iman is shot from one of the army posts

Watchtower “I think that one of the positions took her out.”

Captain R “I and another soldier … are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill … Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her … I also confirmed the kill. Over.”

Capt R then “clarifies” why he killed Iman

“This is commander. Anything that’s mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it’s a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over.”

This article was amended on 1 September 2010, to make explicit that the opening watchtower conversation is between three participants.

THE TWO-STATE DELUSION

Dr Alan Sabrosky

The world is once again been treated to yet another round in the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” charade. The “usual suspects” posturing, pronouncements are being made, speeches have been given, and hints and rumors about a supposed “toughening” in the US Government’s approach to Israel are filtering out from the press. We are supposed to think that something different is about to happen, and that, as the old American folk song had it, “The times, they are a-changing.”

Arranging the Stage

It is all nonsense. The whole exercise strikes me as what the old Soviet Army used to call a maskirovka, sort of a complex strategic masquerade on steroids, with rehearsed actors playing their scripted roles before a fully aware and involved audience, and that includes the head of the American NSC and his “leaked” memos. There may be some blunter words said to Netanyahu than he (or other Israeli prime ministers) have heard in a while, but it isn’t unprecedented. Former President Reagan was VERY pro-Israeli, but he got so incensed at Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon that he reportedly yelled at then-Israeli Prime Minister Begin and deployed Marines with naval support to block them around Beirut. And regardless of how the intervention ended, there were occasions when US Marines and Israeli troops came right up to the edge of a full-scale fire-fight, and I was assured at the time by several Marine officers who were there that they were fully prepared to slug it out with the IDF if that was required, and the 6th Fleet had standing orders to go to the mat in their support if that happened – a far cry from 1967, when it had stood back in the face of the deliberate Israeli air and naval attack on the USS Liberty that killed or wounded more than 200 American sailors and Marines.

Today that would never happen, of course, or the US Navy & Marine Corps would have punched a hole through the Israeli blockade on Gaza and ended their assault on it a few months ago. They didn’t, and President Obama wouldn’t have sent them in, either — most of the rest of the world has been outraged by the brutal Israeli action that killed over 1400 Palestinians and wounded thousands more, the majority of them women and children, but all Obama does is talk about America’s undying commitment to the security of “our staunch ally Israel,” while the US Congress declaims its support of “poor, brave little Israel” <sic.> and continues to vote billions of dollars in assistance to it.

What is going to happen is that stories will leak about “full & frank” discussions between Obama & Netanyahu, and then after hemming and hawing for a while, Netanyahu will grudgingly agree to negotiations leading towards a two-state solution, he will be praised as a “man of peace” (just like Ariel Sharon, right?), and that pot will just keep boiling and boiling until both Obama and Netanyahu go away, or the war with Iran starts and everyone else forgets about the Palestinians, at which point more Jewish settlements go up in the West Bank, more Palestinian homes are demolished in East Jerusalem, and the Israelis invade Gaza again. Q.E.D.

What two states?

Besides, the two-state solution is a dead-in-the-water derelict, and given the Israeli attitude, probably always was. For it to be viable, three things would absolutely have to happen. First, all Israeli settlements would have to be withdrawn from the West Bank and Palestinian refugees allowed to return without Israeli interference. That isn’t going to happen — aside from party positions and other things, can you see Netanyahu telling his favored foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman to pack his suitcase and abandon his home in a West Bank settlement? He won’t, the settlements will stay, and that means the larger piece of this so-called “second state” would have about a half-million armed Jewish settlers in its midst, plus regular Israeli army patrols, plus the fence, plus border guards and check points…and so on.

Second, a viable Palestinian state would have to be sufficiently well armed to make the Israelis think ten times before doing a Gaza strike in either part, and the Israelis flat out won’t go there — the most they’ll accept is a lightly-armed Palestinian police force, because (as they showed in Gaza) policemen can be killed very easily by tactical aircraft, heavy artillery and main battle tanks. This has nothing to do with fear of attack from Palestinians — Israel’s own massive nuclear arsenal and powerful air force utterly negate that option — but with minimizing their own casualties the next time they decide to terrorize the Palestinians.

And last, a viable Palestinian state would need armed guarantees from other nations — a permanent international naval force off Gaza to keep its coast open, heavily armed ground forces in both parts to ensure that an Israeli invasion would hit them first and suffer doing so, and at least one carrier battle group off the coast for air and missile and electronics support. That would close off Israel’s military option against Palestine, so of course they won’t do this, either. So nothing the Palestinians need to be viable and safe will happen, which means there is no two-state solution, and since the US has already announced it won’t employ sanctions or penalties against Israel no matter what (which is why the AIPAC audience applauded Biden….), the whole thing is just propaganda. Harsh language without tangible penalties is meaningless, and ALL of the key players on all sides know this. And that’s the end of it.

Playing the Players

Looking beyond the two-state political zombie requires one to look at the key players. Aside from their impoverishment, geographical separation and vulnerability, about the only cards the Palestinians hold are a willingness to persevere and a comparable willingness to die. The misbegotten Palestinian Authority (PA) is so useless, and its top leaders — Arafat as well as Abbas — have been so bad, that I cannot decide if it and they are creations of Mossad, or simply tolerated to ensure that nothing much better will come along. Hamas is better for Palestinians, of course, which is why it won the election a few years ago, and it is for that reason more than any other that the Jewish lobbies in the US and elsewhere have made its presence in negotiations all but unthinkable. It isn’t because of Hamas involvement in what Israelis call “terrorism” and the Palestinians call “resistance” — most newly-independent countries after WWII, including Israel itself, have been led by parties whose roots were just like Hamas — but because Hamas has more legitimacy and effectiveness than the Palestinian Authority, and is less of a toady to the Israelis, so of course Israel opposes it. It wants a weak, hapless and inept Palestinian leadership, and in Abbas and the PA today it assuredly has what it wants.

Israel itself is a fascinating case study in the principle that people often acquire the worst habits of their oppressors, for the dominant Israeli attitude — openly expressed in their English-language press and blogs, and on news websites outside of the US where criticism of Israel is still permissible — views Arabs generally and Palestinians in particular much the way their last oppressors viewed Jews. Certainly, state-sponsored military Schrecklichkeit (“frightfulness” or “terror”) by these “kosher Nazis” is at the core of their policy towards Palestine, which apparently assumes that if they kill enough Palestinian children and make life sufficiently miserable for the rest, the Palestinians will finally succumb and serve their masters — “ethnic cleansing” these days just being so messy diplomatically. And even when an Israeli government comes to power whose key leaders — Netanyahu and Lieberman — make the neo-Nazi NPD in Germany seem almost moderate, and apartheid-era South Africa look positively liberal, no government in Europe or the United States dares say so and act accordingly. What we get instead is yet another Holocaust memorial, intended less to try to excuse what Jews do to Palestinians today, than to humiliate Europeans and Americans by reminding them of what they did (or did not do) during the Holocaust, as a way of encouraging them to keep out of Israel’s affairs today. And so far it works for them.

As for the United States, the Jewish lobbies together constitute another fascinating case study in history’s only successful takeover of a major power’s central government from within by a domestic Fifth Column, serving the interests of a foreign country. Money, manipulation of political appointments, and management of news and views are the name of the dominance game, and it is a game Jerusalem has played expertly. If anyone ever doubted the extent to which the majority of the US Government has been well and truly bought or compromised, Congressional votes in support of Israel during and after the most recent assault on Gaza, US vetoes of even half-hearted UN attempts to bring Israel to heel and hold it to account, and Bush’s endorsement of Israel’s “right to defend itself” <sic.> speak volumes. Obama’s silence on the issue speaks even louder — contrast that with what he (and the US Congress as well) would likely have said and done if during apartheid South African jets, tanks and artillery had attacked the black township of Soweto the way the Israelis attacked Gaza, killing and wounding thousands of black women and children and turning Soweto into a burning ruin. Somehow, I do not believe silence, indifference or support of Pretoria would have been forthcoming from Washington.

There is only one possible fly in this ointment, from the Israeli perspective, and it is the only one that anyone wishing to unravel this Gordian knot can exploit: American public opinion. At present, a large majority of Americans support Israel, having been fed a steady diet for decades of Israeli “victimization” in the face of Arab “barbarism.” But that support is, as the saying goes in America, “a mile wide and an inch deep,” and AIPAC and company know this, which is why they work so hard to filter what most Americans see, hear and read about the Middle East. But it is a filter that is starting to weaken — more and more Americans surf the internet and encounter very different views, a difference that is reflected in growing criticism of Israel and of US support for it, something that would have been almost impossible even a decade ago. Disrupt this pro-Israel filter, make historical events like the Israeli assault on the USS Liberty and the IDF’s murder of a young American woman named Rachel Corrie household words in the US, bring images of ravaged Gaza into American homes, and watch the world start to change — because it can. And the technology is there to do this.

About the author: Alan Sabrosky (Ph.D, University of Michigan) is a ten-year US Marine Corps veteran and a graduate of the US Army War College.

Gaza war lacked restraint, some Israeli troops say

* Some say commanders told them to shoot first, worry later
* Israel says it tried to avoid civilian casualties
* Report speaks of huge blow to Gaza infrastructure
(Adds Israeli defence minister’s comments, paragraphs 11-12)

By Douglas Hamilton

JERUSALEM, July 15 (Reuters) – Israel rejects charges by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and U.N. agencies that its January invasion of the Gaza Strip inflicted civilian death and destruction on an unjustifiable scale.

Now, some of the Israeli soldiers who took part say they were urged by commanders to shoot first and worry later about sorting out civilians from combatants. Accordingly, they say, the force went into Gaza with guns blazing. In print and video testimony published on Wednesday by the activist group Breaking the Silence, the 30 soldiers say the Israeli army’s imperative was to minimise its own casualties to ensure Israeli public support for the operation.

“Better hit an innocent than hesitate to target an enemy,” is a typical description by one unidentified soldier of his understanding of instructions repeated at pre-invasion briefings and during the 22-day operation, from Dec. 27 to Jan. 18.

“If you’re not sure, kill. Fire power was insane. We went in and the booms were just mad,” says another. “The minute we got to our starting line, we simply began to fire at suspect places.

“In urban warfare, anyone is your enemy. No innocents.”

Israel’s Operation Cast Lead had the declared aim of forcing Islamist Hamas fighters to stop firing rockets at towns in southern Israel.

A Palestinian rights group says 1,417 people were killed, 926 of them civilians. The Israeli army put the death toll at 1,166 and estimated 295 dead were civilians. Israel said 10 of its soldiers and three civilians were killed.

Whole streets in parts of the Gaza Strip were razed to minimise the risk of Israeli casualties from small-arms attacks and booby-trap bombs. The United Nations says Gaza six months later is just beginning to clear 600,000 tonnes of rubble.

The Israeli military rejected criticism in the 112-page Breaking the Silence report as “based on hearsay”. But it pledged in a statement to investigate any formal complaints of misconduct, saying its troops had respected international law during “complex and difficult fighting.”

“MORAL ARMY”

Responding to the report, Defence Minister Ehud Barak said in a statement: “The IDF is one of the most moral armies in the world and behaves in accordance with the highest ethical code.”

He said any organisation with information critical of Israeli military actions “should bring it to me, as Israel’s defence minister, and to the government that directed the IDF to restore peace and quiet to communities in the south.”

Soldiers in Israel’s largely conscript army have standing orders not to talk to the media. The report includes testimonies of 30 “who served in all sectors of the operation”.

“The majority … are still serving in their regular military units and turned to us in deep distress at the moral deterioration of the IDF (Israel Defence Force),” it says.

Their narratives “are enough to bring into question the credibility of the official IDF versions”.

Except for a sergeant named Amir, the soldiers are anonymous and their faces digitally blurred. Transcribed statements can be viewed at http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il. The group said it had funding from Israeli human rights groups and the governments of Britain, the Netherlands and Spain, and from the European Union.

Soldiers describe a “Neighbour Procedure” in which civilians were forced to enter suspect buildings ahead of troops. They cite cases of civilians advancing in front of a soldier resting his rifle on their shoulder.

The report repeats charges — denied by Israel — that white phosphorus was fired indiscriminately into Gaza streets. It cites “massive destruction was unrelated to any direct threat to Israeli forces” and “permissive” rules of engagement.

“We did not get instructions to shoot at anything that moved,” says one soldier. “But we were generally instructed: if you feel threatened, shoot. They kept repeating to us that this is war and in war opening fire is not restricted.”

To strip away cover for Hamas fighters, aerial bombardment, artillery, demolition charges and armoured bulldozers razed whole areas including gardens, and olive and orange groves.

“We didn’t see a single house that was intact … that was not hit. The entire infrastructure, tracks, fields, roads, was in total ruin. The D-9 (bulldozer) had gone over everything,” the report quoted a soldier as saying.

“There was a clear feeling, and this was repeated whenever others spoke to us, that no humanitarian consideration played any role in the army at present. The goal was to carry out an operation with the least possible casualties for the army.”

Amnesty International has labelled Israel’s actions as “wanton” destruction and said it was “outrageously accusing the Israeli military of war crimes”. (Editing by Richard Balmforth)