The military affairs analyst for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth said that the attack that took place this morning at the Tarqumiya checkpoint west of Hebron, which led to the killing of 3 Israeli police officers, indicates that the West Bank is no longer the secondary arena in the conflict.
“For 330 days, the IDF and the Shin Bet have managed to keep the Judea and Samaria (West Bank) sector as a secondary area compared to Gaza, but they have warned of the possibility of its explosion,” Yossi Yehoshua wrote in his article. “Recent events, including the attack in which 3 people were killed this morning near Hebron, indicate that this sector is no longer the secondary arena.”
The military analyst considered the recent operations in the Hebron area to be “a significant step forward in the characteristics of Palestinian attacks… No more stabbing attacks like there were here in the 2015 wave. No more shooting attacks like we saw in 2022, which led to Operation Breaking the Wave (a military campaign launched by the occupation in March 2022 to confront the increase in shootings by the Palestinian resistance in the West Bank). These are powerful explosive devices and attacks, of the type we knew in the second intifada.”
“There is an infrastructure, there is a carrier, there is someone who prepared the shipment and there is someone who financed it,” he added, noting that “the explosive devices come from the breached Jordanian border and the perforated separation fence (between the West Bank and the 1948 territories) that allows penetration not only for workers but also for terrorists,” he claimed.
Although he pointed to what he called the success of the occupation army in launching a military operation to deal with the resistance in the northern West Bank in both Tulkarm and Jenin, in addition to confronting many explosive devices in the northern Jordan Valley, he stressed that “the danger now lies in the fact that the operations have extended to the Hebron area, which is considered the capital of Hamas in the West Bank, where the organized and dangerous infrastructure is located, as the attack that took place this morning near Tarqumiya showed that its danger is increasing.”
“If they listen to Khaled Meshaal’s (Hamas leader abroad) instructions last week to return to bombings, we could enter a very difficult period,” he added, noting that “most of the IDF’s skilled regular and reserve forces are in the Gaza Strip and on the northern border, so if the recent attacks (the attack on the Gush Etzion and Karmei Tzur settlements, which ended with three Israelis wounded) had been carried out as planned, they could have ended with double-digit deaths, and made Judea and Samaria the main arena of confrontation.”
Withdrawal from Philadelphia and cessation of war
After pointing out that an Israeli soldier was killed and another was wounded in the attack launched by the occupation forces on Jenin, he relied on the statements of the Chief of Staff of the Israeli army, Herzi Halevi, in which he justified the invasion of the refugee camps in the West Bank to prevent the exit of car bombs from them, and said that “this statement embodies exactly the activity that the Israeli army will have to carry out from now on. Enter the cities and centers of terrorism and thwart the next terrorist attack there. It will be more complicated, we will have victims, but there is no other way to stop the explosive belt that kills in Gush Etzion or Tel Aviv.”
The military commentator then moved on to support the position of Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant, who is demanding that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agree to withdraw from the Philadelphi Corridor, which would lead to stopping the war and releasing some of the occupation’s prisoners in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.
“Galant and the heads of the defense establishment support withdrawing from the axis in order to save the lives of between 20 abductees (perhaps more) and 15 more bodies,” Yehoshua said. “This argument joins the IDF’s announcement last night that it had found several bodies of abductees in the Gaza Strip. In a brief and ridiculous announcement, it was reported that the identification and rescue operation had not yet been completed. The rescue of abductees who are not among the living only sharpens the assessment that the defense establishment and Galant are right in this case.”