http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/07/22/stifgnmid02001.html

July 22 2001 MIDDLE EAST

Army moles hunt Israeli troops linked to terror
Uzi Mahnaimi, Tel Aviv

MOLES have been placed within the Israeli defence forces in an attempt to unearth army officers and soldiers collaborating with Jewish terrorists.

An extremist anti-Arab movement is suspected of being behind last week's shooting of three members of a West Bank family, including a three-month-old girl. In the recriminations that followed, Avraham Dichter, head of Shin Bet - Israel's equivalent of MI5 - admitted to Israel's parliament that such extremist cells exist.

Suspicions about the link with the military intensified when a large quantity of army explosives was discovered in the car of an extremist settler's wife in Hebron. "We suspect that huge quantities of arms were smuggled by officers sympathetic to the Jewish underground," said a security source close to the investigation.

Postmortems on the three members of the al-Tmeizi family shot last week, have shown they were killed with 5.56mm bullets, used by the Israeli army. Diya al-Tmeizi, the baby killed, was born to her parents following fertility treatment after 12 years of childlessness. Her mother was injured.

[PHOTO]
Diya al-Tmeizi is held by her mother before burial

Photograph: Reinhard Krause

Shin Bet's surveillance of suspected military collaborators is extremely sensitive, since many recruits have been drawn from within the religious West Bank settler families. "Most are first-rate, obedient and trustworthy," said the intelligence source. "But we know there are some bad weeds among them."

The group linked with the murders is the shadowy Committee for Road Safety, a cell connected to the anti-Arab movement, Kach. The committee was formed 20 years ago by Rabbi Meir Kahane, the guru of Jewish zealots.

Kahane was killed in America and his son and daughter-in-law were murdered by Arabs. Police sources believe friends of Kahane's murdered son may have been the plotters of last week's attack.

The security services' surveillance is also intended to locate collaborators who provide the Jewish cells with information about the army's movements.

Israeli intelligence officers fear that collaborator networks could target politicians, a security priority for Shin Bet since its failure to prevent the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, the former prime minister, in 1995.

This weekend Israeli security was preparing for a possible Palestinian retaliation. Jibril Rajoub, the head of security for the Palestinian Authority, said that he had a full list of Jewish zealots, which he would submit to the Israeli security services.

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