Tha’ir Hamad was a twenty-two-year-old lone Palestinian sniper who’d carried out an attack on soldiers at a checkpoint at the beginning of the Second Intifada. All he had was an old WWII Mauser rifle and thirty rounds of ammunition. Before dawn on the morning of March 3, 2002, Tha’ir Hamad dug a hiding place under some olive trees on a hilltop overlooking Wadi al Haramiya—the Valley of Thieves—and waited for the Israeli reserve company manning the checkpoint at Uyoun al Haramiya. He fired four times, killing four soldiers. The two soldiers who emerged to locate the shooter and assist the fallen soldiers were also shot dead. He fired at reinforcements when they arrived, killing the sergeant and wounding several of his men. An Israeli woman with her children arrived to pass through the checkpoint, but he yelled at her to leave, refraining from harming them. He finally left when the rifle jammed on the last bullet, twenty-five minutes after he started firing. The Israelis dispatched helicopters and canine search units to find the shooter, but they didn’t even manage to find his hiding place. He would have gotten away with it, had he not made the mistake of confiding in a friend. His name became synonymous with precision and expert marksmanship.

I kept my head down, strangely calm, running the previous days through my head. I knew Bilal and Ghassan had something to do with this. We were all to find out five hours before they put their plan into action, but the pregnancy stick had hastened a change in plans to get me out of the country. Did he tell Jumana not to answer my calls? Did she know? I looked back at the letter.

… forgiven us both. I cannot bear the thought of what they would do to you while you’re pregnant with our child. So I am …

The driver turned the radio back on, keeping the volume low.

“… third site, and now we’re told there are sirens at Huwwara, making this the fourth checkpoint ambush in half an hour. This is incredible! Incredible! No one has taken responsibility, as far as we know. We’ve received calls from eyewitnesses who told us that some of the soldiers were hit with arrows.”

The voice of a caller crackled through poor cell reception: “I saw it with my own eyes at Huwwara. Long live the resistance! A group of shabab looked like they had gotten into a fight, and the soldiers all came out with their guns drawn to break up the chaos. All those boys and about ten more came up on them pointing aerosol cans—it turned out to be hornet spray—and released it in streams on their faces. The soldiers started scampering back when all these arrows—like American Indian arrows!—rained down on them. Praise God! Praise God! God bless our warriors! God bless the resistance. God protect them. Allahu akbar.” God is bigger.