UP AL-KEEK:

Lies, spies and traitors (Martin Chulov, June 17, 2008, The Australian)

JUST before sunset on April 30 one of Gaza's most loved teachers Awad al-Keek drove slowly away from his school.

He may have heard the foreboding whump of an Israeli Apache attack helicopter as it swept in low through the hazy spring sky. Others in the southern town of Rafah certainly did. The Apaches are always a soundtrack of trouble brewing, invariably followed by a crescendo of explosions and sirens.

Saleh Awad, a plump father of nine from a poor nearby neighbourhood, listened and watched with great trepidation. Using an Israeli SIM card in his Palestinian phone, he had just called his handlers at the Jewish state's intelligence headquarters in Tel Aviv and told them al-Keek was in the car with the local brains trust of the militant group, Islamic Jihad.

The boom that followed left one of Islamic Jihad's darkest secrets in shards of flesh and twisted metal. Al-Keek, the chief rocket engineer of Islamic Jihad, was dead. So were four of his colleagues.

The month since has revealed a series of bitter realities for all stakeholders in the tragic arena of Gaza; the UN Relief and Works Agency which paid al-Keek's teacher's salary for at least the past two years, the shell-shocked locals of Rafah and hunted militants among them, and the Israelis who have since seen Awad - one of their most valuable informants - caught, exposed and condemned.