Zbeida's skin is the color of roasted pecans. A year and a half ago he was helping build a bomb when it exploded in his face, leaving his high cheeks, nose and forehead permanently blackened. Red veins snake across the whites of his eyes; he suffers from a detached retina and he has difficulty seeing in the harsh glare of the desert's daylight hours.
Last winter, three bullets slammed into Zbeida's shoulder as he fled an Israeli raid on one of his hideouts. In March, undercover Israeli border patrol officers ambushed his car in Jenin. Zbeida was not in the vehicle, but five of his lieutenants were killed.
Zakaria Zbeida, an al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades commander, passes the offices of Jenin's governor on July 31, hours after he and his men set the building on fire.
(Mohammed Ballas -- AP)
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During an interview this summer, AH-64 Apache helicopters rumbled over the building where he was hiding. He slipped outside and disappeared into the narrow lanes of the camp as children on nearby rooftops shouted the locations of the patrolling choppers.
Zbeida is near the top of Israel's list of most hunted Palestinian militants. His most heinous crime, according to Israeli sources, was organizing the Nov. 28, 2002, election-day attack in which two gunmen opened fire on a polling station. Six Israelis and both gunmen were killed.
The attack came two days after Zbeida took command of the Jenin cell of al-Aqsa from Alaa Sabagh. One of Zbeida's childhood friends, Sabagh was killed in an Israeli missile strike on his hideout.
Since then, Zbeida's cell has carried out no suicide bombings inside Israel, according to Israeli military records. The three suicide attacks launched from Jenin during that period were claimed by Islamic Jihad. The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center said Zbeida's fighters had concentrated on the "shooting and planting of explosive devices in the Jenin area," targeting Jewish settlers and Israeli security forces.
Zbeida roams freely throughout the refugee camp, where almost every door is open to him and residents regularly call his cell phone to warn of approaching Israeli troops and aircraft. But he said he seldom ventures outside the warrens of chalky white buildings stacked against a hillside on the western edge of the city of Jenin. The 93-acre camp is his refuge and his prison.
"I carry a gun 24 hours a day," he said in a soft, even voice. He keeps a stainless steel Smith & Wesson pistol tucked inside the belt of his worn jeans. Often he carries a battered M-16 assault rifle.
Zbeida, who has a ninth-grade education, is representative of the generation of boys who came of age in the refugee camps during an earlier Palestinian uprising against Israel that began in 1987. He grew up with five brothers and two sisters and a strong-willed mother. His father died of cancer in 1993. At age 13, Zbeida said, he was shot in the knee by Israeli soldiers during a demonstration in which Palestinians were throwing rocks at them. He spent five of his teenage years in Israeli jails for throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at soldiers.
After he was released in 1994 under agreements reached in the Oslo peace accords, Zbeida, who learned Hebrew in prison, worked as an interpreter for an Israeli Jew who sponsored a community theater group housed on the top floor of his mother's house. He said he also supported himself by stealing cars and working construction jobs in Israel, and later took a job as a policeman for the Palestinian Authority.
When the current Palestinian uprising began, Zbeida quit the police force and joined the Jenin cell of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, then headed by a first cousin. The organization was created by Arafat's Fatah movement to compete with increasingly popular rivals such as Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas.
In the spring of 2002, Israeli forces attacked the Jenin refugee camp in response to suicide bombings in Israel. Zbeida's mother and brother were shot dead by Israeli soldiers. His mother was standing in the window of her home, and his brother had joined gunmen defending the camp, family members said. Two more brothers have been jailed by Israel, they added.
Now, after nearly two years of dodging Israeli aircraft and snipers, Zbeida said, "I've adapted to being a militant."
His family, however, has not.
