The military has successfully held back the Iranian axis from smuggling weapons into the West Bank through the Israeli-Jordanian border that would have flooded the area with high-stakes terrorist threats, IDF Lt.-Col. Aviv Amir, the commander of the Jordan Valley defenses, said on Tuesday at his outgoing ceremony, The Jerusalem Post has learned.
One of Israel’s greatest ongoing security challenges, given its progress on many other fronts, is its weak and relatively porous border with Jordan, something which Tehran has tried to exploit in recent years to advance far more deadly terrorist attacks by Palestinians in the West Bank against Israelis.
This threat has become so significant that Defense Minister Israel Katz has made one of his primary focuses investing in a new, much more secure border fence to the tune of NIS 5.2 billion on a front that was once completely ignored.
Chief of operations for Southern Command
Amir’s next post will be as the chief of operations for the Southern Command, a sign that the IDF believes he was successful in his high-stakes task.
“Two years ago, we started a journey to defend our homeland. Even then, this front was heating up after a few terrorist attacks occurred in the area. The land was the same land, but the operational challenges grew substantially,” said Amir, in portions of the remarks which the Post obtained, but which were not part of the summary highlighted for the media.
He continued, “The smuggling became institutionalized with the support of the axis of evil [Iran’s axis of proxies], and many terrorist attacks started to flow through from the western side of this front.”
Further, Amir said that his forces worked day and night, under great personal stress, to keep up with a much faster pace of combating terrorism in the area.
Also, he said that he and his soldiers worked hard to learn from their mistakes, and this helped them improve substantially in their fight against the evolving terrorist threat from Iran and its West Bank terror proxies.
Still, he said there will always be more work to do to keep up with the ongoing threats.
Moreover, Amir said that his forces had killed 85 terrorists, seized over 500 weapons, thwarted around 40 smuggling attempts, and caught around 120 persons trying to infiltrate the border.
IDF Central Command chief Maj.-Gen. Avi Bluth said that Amir had succeeded in shifting his forces’ conceptual approach to the new terrorist trends by adding a large number of new border military positions and by incorporating portions of the new Gilad Division (96).
IDF Col. Gilad Schwecki replaces Amir in the border command role.
Building the new Israel-Jordan fence was a goal that Katz’s predecessor, Yoav Gallant, had tried to achieve progress on and failed.
It is unclear exactly how Katz brought the Finance Ministry on board on this issue. It may have been related to his better interpersonal relations with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
But timing may have been the defining factor – perhaps the government would not have been able to push forward with such a big initiative while it was still fighting hard against Hezbollah and Hamas back in 2024.
But whatever the background, the fact is that Katz got this NIS 5.2b. project through which Gallant had been unable to move.
Sources said Katz went all-in to make sure Iran could not smuggle weapons into the West Bank and cause Israel new strategic threats.