After murdering four Israelis outside Hebron on Aug. 30, the Hamas gunmen planned to bury their bodies and use them as live hostages to extort the release of fellow-terrorists from Israeli jails. This was divulged by the Egyptian semi-official Al Ahram Monday, Sept. 20. Cairo was so astonished by Israel's failure fight the new wave of Hamas terror that it leaked this information, gained from grilling Hamas General Security chief Muhamad Hamis Dababash, to the Egyptian newspaper.
DEBKAfile broke the story of the arrest of the head of Hamas executive at Cairo Airport on Sept. 17, after which it was picked up by the Arab media.

According to our military sources, Egypt referred the findings of the first round of his interrogation to Israel the next day. Thee Egyptian authorities figured the plot they uncovered was brutal enough to warrant a strong Israel reprisal. When this did not happen, Cairo leaked it to Al Ahram.

Dababash, it turned out, was personally complicit in planning the attack at the Bani Naim road junction outside Hebron. The Hamas gunmen who murdered Yizhak and Tali Emus, the parents of six children, and their two passengers, Cochava Even Haim and Avishai Schindler, were instructed to videotape the attack, including
the second round of shooting at point-blank range. They were to carry the bodies to a secret place and bury them. Hamas would then claim the four victims were being held hostage for trading with jailed Palestinian terrorists.
Al Ahram went on to report that Hamas headquarters and Damascus and the Gaza Strip banked on a strong Israeli response to the fake "abductions." The IDF would ruthlessly hunt down the "kidnappers," the while breaking off the direct talks just begun with the Palestinians under US auspices, and reoccupy the West Bank cities and villages handed over to the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority would be swept away in the mayhem forcing Mahmoud Abbas to quit as chairman.
The only possible source of this information, according to our sources, must have been a high-profile Hamas executive with a personal hand in the plot, namely Dababash.
The Egyptians were totally nonplussed when 48 hours after this intelligence was put in Israel's hands, Israel was idle. Even more puzzling was the Netanyahu government's passivity in the face of another connected security threat: Hamas cells had infiltrated the Sinai Peninsula from Gaza bent on a dual mission: to abduct Israeli holidaymakers and repeat their mortar-missile attack on Eilat and possibly Jordanian Aqaba too during the weeklong Succoth festival beginning Wednesday, Sept. 22.

Hamas's plans placed Egyptian security forces on a high state of preparedness.
A senior intelligence source in Cairo said that, even if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak calculated that a counter-terror operation would write finis on the new diplomatic track with the Palestinians, it is nonetheless unthinkable to give Hamas free rein to strike Israelis at will on the West Bank and from Sinai.

It is also counter-productive, said the source; the Palestinian terrorist group will only take advantage of the free license granted by Israel and carry out increasingly grievous attacks until the talks crash anyway.

Our sources stress that Egyptian intelligence agencies have never before released findings from interrogations of terrorist suspects, especially Palestinians, just three days after an arrest. It shows how furious Cairo is over Israel's inaction and how desperate to goad its government into pursuing and fighting the Hamas terrorists.

While the material leaked to Al Ahram was attributed to several Palestinians in Egyptian custody, DEBKAfile has concluded that this is merely an effort to disguise the fact that Dababash, the Hamas General Security chief, is the source.