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Israelis Fear Attack From Restive West Bank Will Spark Wider War | Avi Melamed’s insights quoted in the article by Ethan Bronner for BLOOMBERG.
“This has deeper roots than hopelessness or a lack of jobs,” says Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence officer. “It’s really about idealizing militants.”
Almost a year after Hamas attacked southern Israel, triggering a punishing war in Gaza and upending regional geopolitics, concerns are growing that Palestinian militants could stage a similar incursion from the West Bank and provoke an even broader conflict.
“That’s a constant worry,” Shimon Zaraf, 50, a landscaper who doubles as an armed guard in the Israeli farming collective of Nitzanei Oz north of Tel Aviv, said as he surveyed the fenced-off scrubland between his village and the West Bank town of Tulkarm 400 meters (1,300 feet) away. “If someone manages to infiltrate, the psychological effect on our sense of safety will be intolerable.”
The heightened tensions in the West Bank are due to a confluence of factors: The Palestinian Authority is cash-strapped and struggling to assert its authority; militants are smuggling increasing numbers of weapons into the territory, according to Israeli officials; and the Israeli military, shamed by its failure to prevent the Oct. 7 raid in the south that claimed 1,200 lives, has stepped up raids in a bid to deter further attacks.
Meanwhile, the risk of an all-war between Israel and Lebanon-based Hezbollah, which have staged tit-for-tat strikes since the Gaza conflict erupted, has also sharply escalated this month. The Iran-backed group accused Israel of causing thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies to explode in Lebanon, attacks that killed more than 30 people and wounded over 3,000, an allegation Israel didn’t confirm or deny. Those events were followed by an Israeli air strike on Beirut that killed several senior Hezbollah commanders. Hezbollah has been firing barrages of missiles into Israel, which has broadened aerial bombardments of southern Lebanon.
About 3 million Palestinians live in West Bank and their internal movement is heavily restricted. More than 150,000 of them who used to work in Israel have been barred from entering since the onset of the war in Gaza, impoverishing their families.
Palestinians say harassment, vandalism and assault by Jewish settlers who have illegally occupied parts of the West Bank have become increasingly commonplace — a complaint validated by an outgoing general who commanded Israel’s forces in the territory.
In one incident, about 100 masked settlers entered the Palestinian village of Jit in mid-August, setting cars on fire, and one man was killed. The Israeli military, which has ultimate command over the West Bank, failed to step in. Israel’s coalition government includes far right-wing politicians who back oppose Palestinian autonomy and have played down settler violence.
A top Israeli security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the current situation on the West Bank as just short of boiling point.
Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian political scientist who teaches at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah, said Israel’s actions have created fertile ground for Iran and Hamas, another of its proxies, to build influence and support on the West Bank.
“Weapons are coming in, but why are people looking for weapons and using them?” Khatib said. “The answer is occupation and war in Gaza.”
More than 650 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the start of the war in Gaza, the bulk of them by Israeli forces, according to the United Nations. Israel says many of those who died were militants.
“We’re not going to allow an Oct. 7 to happen from the West Bank,” said Miri Eisin, a former military intelligence officer, who now teaches at Reichman University’s Institute for Counter-Terrorism. “We are being preemptive. The big failure of Oct. 7 was nobody thought it possible. The unthinkable is now our reality.”
Military-grade anti-personnel mines have been smuggled into the West Bank from Iran, according to Daniel Hagari, chief spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces. Hamas leaders have called for a return to suicide attacks that ended two decades ago and in recent weeks, two booby-trapped cars were detonated in the territory. Meanwhile, three Israeli police officers were shot near Hebron in the southern West Bank, while three Israeli forklift operators were killed at a border crossing with Jordan.
Hamas, which is considered a terrorist group by the US yet enjoys strong support in the West Bank, claimed credit for the attacks on the police officers and the car bombings.
In a breach of a decades-long unwritten ban on embarrassing its eastern neighbor and security partner, Israel’s foreign minister publicly alleged that Jordan has been an unwitting conduit for contraband weapons.
“Iran is working to destabilize Jordan and establish an eastern terror front against Israel, following the Gaza and Lebanon models, by funding and arming terrorists and smuggling advanced weapons into Jordan and then into Judea and Samaria,” Israel Katz, said in an Aug. 28 post on X, using the biblical name for the West Bank.
Ayman Safadi, his Jordanian counterpart and a regular critic of Israel’s actions, fired back, accusing the Israelis of “attempting in vain to divert global attention away from their aggression on Gaza and the West Bank, by spreading disinformation about the reality of the threats to regional security.”
Some Israeli analysts say Iran’s successful efforts to radicalize Palestinians, rather than settler-provoked violence or deprivation among West Bank residents, is the main driver of recent tensions.
“This has deeper roots than hopelessness or a lack of jobs,” says Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence officer. “It’s really about idealizing militants.”
Samer Sinijlawi, a Palestinian activist from the mainstream Fatah movement who opposes PA President Mahmoud Abbas, said Hamas and other militant groups are using money sourced from Iran to lure young recruits who have no income, job prospects or entertainment, paying them a few hundred dollars a month.
“It’s a recipe for disaster,” he said. “We are becoming agents for Iran.”
The precise role played by Iran, which advocates the destruction of the Jewish state, is a topic of intense debate. Israeli officials say Iran has stepped up activities in the West Bank partly to compensate for losses incurred by Hamas in the war in Gaza, which has largely been reduced to rubble.
Hamas’s military capability has been mostly dismantled, as has its missile arsenal and rocket-making facilities. More than 41,000 people have died in the fighting in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between fighters and civilians.
Israel has lost more than 340 troops in combat in Gaza, the West Bank and on the Lebanese front.
While the West Bank has been spared wide-scale destruction so far, the Israeli military is increasingly resorting to tactics it has been using in Gaza, including using drone surveillance and pursuing militants who’ve taken refuge in mosques and schools — destroying or damaging the buildings in the process.
“There’s no nice way to take action against terror,” said Eisin, the former intelligence officer. “Now it’s no holds barred.”
Zaraf, the landscaper who is also mayor of his village, said he is reassured by the more proactive stance the military has adopted toward countering the threat of an attack being staged from the West Bank as it was from Gaza. “Can the same number of people come in? The answer is no. Can some come in nonetheless? The answer is yes,” he said. “We have woken up to the fact that it can happen to us, albeit in smaller numbers.”
Israelis Fear Attack From Restive West Bank Will Spark Wider War | Avi Melamed’s insights quoted in the article by Ethan Bronner for BLOOMBERG.
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