Here is a column I wrote, under the pen-name of Desiderius Erasmus an old Dutch philosopher, for a monthly Illinois newsletter on the Second Amendment. Old Desiderius’ motto was In the Land of the Blind, the One-eyed Man is King, which meant that you didn’t have to be perfect in your skillset, just better than your opponent. In Latin, the phrase is “in regione caecorum rex est luscus.”
In regione caecorum rex est luscus
In the Land of the Blind, the One-eyed Man is King
By “Desiderius Erasmus,” a GSL member
Coup de grâce Drone?
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were steadily closing in on a real scumbag slinking from one ruined house to another in the Tel al-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah in the Gaza Strip. For weeks, his safe areas shrank and shrank, as each morning he awoke wondering if this would be his last day on earth. For years, he had been hailed by crowds of cowards for killing helpless women and children. Now, scurrying from shadow to shadow he seemed ever so much that of a nervous little vermin, contaminated to the point that no one wanted to have anything to do with him.
This was Yahya Sinwar, the fearsome Hamas militant leader who had helped unleash a vicious war over a year ago. Now he was cornered, and any allies he ever had were nowhere to be found – they had abandoned him. Today was his last day.
In August, he had been underground in a tunnel complex, where six Israeli hostages were murdered – maybe in his presence. Maybe he had been the one to cut their throats as they were shackled, and watched with feral glee as they bled out.
The Israelis had been so close. Last January 31, commandos raided a tunnel lair in the city of Khan Yunis in Gaza. That underground system was called “The Kingdom” by Israeli operatives, the “sons and daughters” of the Mossad agents that conducted Operation Wrath of God that hunted down and killed Palestinian Liberation Organization [PLO] terrorists who had murdered Israelis hostages at the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich, Germany.
But those weren’t just some sanitized long-range hits similar to countless Hollywood action movies. The deputy director of Mossad explained the desired psychological “endstate”: “The aim was not so much revenge, but mainly to make them [the PLO terrorists] frightened. We wanted to make them look over their shoulders and feel that we are upon them. And therefore we tried not to do things by just shooting a guy in the street – that’s easy.” No stone was left unturned in the effort to let everyone know exactly what was coming. Several hours before each “elimination”, the target’s family received flowers with a condolence card reading: “A reminder we do not forget or forgive.”
Good detective work now combines even more high tech. For years, the Israelis had held Sinwar in prison (Israel had sentenced him to four life terms for murdering Palestinians he had accused of working with the Jewish state), before he was among many terrorists traded for an Israeli soldier years ago. But first, they had collected his DNA. Now, searching through “The Kingdom” the hunters found human urine residue – apparently Yahya had forgotten to flush.
For weeks before the final day, when they assessed that no hostages were in the shafts, Israeli troops pumped many tunnels around Rafah full of thick nontoxic gas in an attempt to smoke-out terrorists – perhaps borrowing a page from the Orkin Man. But a rat – is a rat – is a rat. Finally, Israeli troops got lucky, and it wasn’t Mossad, but a regular Israeli training unit, the Bislach Brigade, operating in Tel al-Sultan that spotted three men slinking from house to house. However, the soldiers had no idea that one of the men was Sinwar.
At this point, accounts get a little hazy. Some sources state that a firefight broke out and that two of the three men fled into a building, and the third into an adjacent one. Troops shot and killed the first two men and cornered the third in the other structure, and then deployed a drone to examine the ruined building’s interior. The drone entered from the upper floor and filmed a wounded man sitting in a chair, who hurled a stick at the tiny craft. Moments later, an Israeli sniper shot the man in the head, as a tank fired into the building. The man was Yahya Sinwar. As IDF spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said: “He tried to escape and our forces eliminated him.”
But maybe it didn’t go down that way. A reliable source recalls seeing 15 years ago an IDF drone capable of putting a single bullet on a forehead, along with real-time footage from a tiny drone of a known terrorist coming out of a building, who after the drone identified him as a terrorist, pumped one shot to his head and a second bullet to his chest. The human shield, a 9-year-old boy, whose hand the terrorist was holding, was completely unscathed. A little drone, linked to face-recognition technology, and sporting a precise, low collateral damage, kill weapon.
Was it an Israeli drone like this, or an Israeli soldier, who fired the final shots terminating this piece of scum? Only Yahya Sinwar knows. And he ain’t talking.