I recently visited with the new IDF Panther battalion created specifically to deal with the growing threat of Hamas and other jihadist groups on Israel’s seam line, the boundary between the northern West Bank (Samaria) and Israel’s narrow waistline, only nine miles to the Mediterranean Sea.
The seam line is part of the 1949 Armistice line (Green Line or 1967 line) that runs north to south on the western border of the West Bank, close to Israel’s major coastal cities, including Tel Aviv. Two large Palestinian cities, Tulkarm and Kalkilya, are on the seam line.
These Palestinian cities are controlled in whole or part by Hamas operatives, not the Palestinian Authority. These cities have become terror centers, as close to Israeli towns on the other side of the Seam Line as Israeli communities were to Hamas terror centers in Gaza. Iran and Hamas’s goal is to turn the West Bank into Gaza, in other words, Hamastan.
According to an officer in the Panther battalion I spoke with, Hamas completely controls the city of Tulkarm and is in a battle with the PA for control of Kalkilya. Both towns are within short-range rocket distance to Netanya, Hadera, Herzliya, and Tel Aviv.
I also spent time with the deputy battalion commander in Jenin and Nablus, two primary terror centers in Samaria (northern West Bank). As Meir Ben-Shabbat, Israel’s former National Security Adviser and chief of staff for National Security, wrote in Israel Hayom, “Jenin is at risk of Gazafication. The West Bank is currently defined as a secondary arena in Israel’s multi-arena campaign. Successfully addressing its challenges now will help maintain this definition and prevent the area from deteriorating into a situation that Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas would like to see.”
According to Steven Erlanger in an article in The New York Times headlined, “Palestinian Fighters in West Bank Seek to Emulate Hamas in Gaza,” he said, “In Tulkarm and Jenin, armed militants are flocking to more hard-line factions, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad… More weapons and explosives are being manufactured in the West Bank… Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority… is losing ground to the more radical Palestinian factions, who are actively fighting Israel and gaining more support from Iran in the form of cash and weapons smuggled into the territory.”
I confirmed during my visits to Judea and Samaria (West Bank) that Iran is trying to bring many more weapons and missile technology to the West Bank to enable Hamas to create a missile threat close to Israel’s major cities, like the missile arsenal. Hamas had in Gaza. This is all part of Iran’s long-term strategy to create a ring of fire around Israel to tighten the noose while demoralizing the Israeli people.
MY COLLEAGUE Jonathan Spyer, writing in The Jerusalem Post, said, “The weaponry now trafficked included and includes C4, TNT, mines, anti-tank mines, RPG launchers, and missiles of various types, including anti-armor and anti-personnel missiles.”
Iran broke the rules
Tying the West Bank to the overarching geostrategic threat of Iran was explained to me by two of Israel’s leading intelligence and military experts close to the prime minister. They told me that the reason for Israel’s alleged targeting of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Brig.-Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi in the Iranian embassy annex in Damascus, which led to the Iranian attack of ballistic and cruise missiles from Iran targeting Israel, was that Iran had crossed two unspoken red lines.
One line Iran crossed was the increased flow of weapons into the West Bank via Jordan as well as expanding the missile threat there, which, to this time, has been nearly nonexistent. The other line crossed was Iranian-directed attacks from its Popular Mobilization Units PMU militias in Iraq targeting Eilat in southern Israel.
Zahedi was a senior commander in IRGC Quds Force, a US-designated terror organization, in charge of the Lebanon and Syria operations as well as the “Palestinian sphere.”
A report in The Times of Israel said, “At the current rate of smuggling from Jordan, Palestinian terror groups in the West Bank will be able to launch rockets into Israel within a year.”
I was able to independently confirm that Iran has been attempting and succeeding in bringing game-changing weapons like RPG (rocket-propelled grenades) and missile-building knowledge to the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) through Israel’s longest border along the Jordan River Valley. Hamas and its jihadist affiliates, supplied and funded by the IRGC, are on the cusp of building the foundation for a missile arsenal similar to the rockets Hamas used to such devastating effect beginning on October 7.
The Jordan River Valley is Israel’s longest border and seems far too porous, even with a sophisticated fence. One needs to look at October 7 to understand why barriers are not a failsafe to stop an invasion, let alone the smuggling of missiles and arms.
As for the direct threat to Israel’s major population centers from Palestinian cities along the seam line that have been radicalized, Israel does not have an underground border fence blocking tunnels from transiting into Israeli territory. The potential for a mass incursion and invasion overtaking Israeli communities that border the seam line is real.
I visited the largest Hezbollah tunnel on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon six years ago. It was twenty stories deep and almost a half mile long, entering Israeli territory near border towns, and could have transited hundreds of Radwan fighters into borderline communities in minutes. Think October 7, but worse.
HAMAS WOULD like to create a tunnel system in the West Bank and has the knowledge from the 700-kilometer underground labyrinth they created in Gaza as well as the help of Iran’s primary military division, Hezbollah, to build a West Bank terror tunnel system.
What will America do if the West Bank explodes with something akin to a third intifada?
Suppose America continues to use a Western outlook, not employing strategic empathy to understand the mindset and patience of our Middle Eastern adversaries, as Lt.-Gen. H. R. McMaster counseled the US government. In that case, the patience of jihadists will win out. Israel must be given great latitude to continue to fight Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and every other Iranian-funded and directed jihadist movement, whether in the West Bank, Gaza, or Lebanon, to create real deterrence.
If we want to stabilize the rings of Iranian fire surrounding Israel, we need American foreign policy analysts who think in years and decades, not weeks or months.
Suppose Israel is forced to end combat operations prematurely, whether in Gaza, Lebanon, or the West Bank, before a significant deterrence is restored, condemning Israel to fight wars on Western timelines with Islamists who use our impatience for tactical and strategic advantage. In that case, the result ultimately will undermine US security interests by weakening our strategic allies.
Hamas and other Iranian allies have mastered the art of playing the West against Israel by using the images of their own people’s suffering to manipulate a naïve Western audience and governments.
Just as in the North, the question of a major war is not if but when. In the West Bank, a major Iranian-inspired and controlled uprising is just a matter of time. It will also destabilize US allies in Jordan and Egypt and strain our moderate Gulf allies, another reason for this or the next administration to craft a long-range strategy based on Middle East time.
The answer is not putting out fires but finally dealing with the arsonist, Iran. Let’s be pro-Iranian, that is, pro-Iranian people. Enforce sanctions, destabilize the economy of the government of terror, and support the Iranian people. That is how to address the root cause of instability in the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon. Otherwise, we will continue to put band-aids on a hemorrhage, hoping to kick the problem down the proverbial road to the next American election.
The writer is the director of MEPIN, the Middle East Political Information Network, senior security editor of The Jerusalem Report, and a contributor to The Hill and The Jerusalem Post. He regularly briefs members of the US Congress and their foreign policy advisers about the Middle East.