West Bank emerges as Israel's primary security threat

Israel has not gotten back the hostages, and many of them have died since February, but that is a complex political and diplomatic decision and less of a straight military decision.

By YONAH JEREMY BOB NOVEMBER 27, 2024 17:20 Updated: NOVEMBER 27, 2024 17:21

Weapons uncovered in the West Bank as part of a smuggling operation from Iran into the West Bank, November 27, 2024. (photo credit: IDF SPOKESPERSON'S UNIT)

No one is saying this explicitly, but the 2023-2024 Middle East war is basically over.

Surprisingly, what this means is that the greatest near-term danger to Israeli security – certainly for Israeli civilians – will return to being the West Bank, as it was before this war.

How does that make any sense?

First, recall that the IDF defeated most of Hamas militarily by February, and after waiting three months, in May-June, finished off Hamas militarily in Rafah.

Israel has not gotten back the hostages, and many of them have died since February, but that is a complex political and diplomatic decision and less of a straight military decision.

Israeli soldiers inspect the Shavei Shomron checkpoint, west of the West Bank city of Nablus, November 12, 2024 (credit: NASSER ISHTAYEH/FLASH90)

Also, as horrible as the hostage situation is, Hamas had not presented a real danger to Israeli civilians since its last major series of rocket volleys in January (it had a very short large barrage in May when Rafah was invaded, but that was just firing off last remaining inventory.)

West Bank emerges as Israel’s biggest security threat

That means that for the last five months or even nine months, what actually was endangering Israelis, especially civilians, was the war with Hezbollah.

Until September and early October, when the IDF killed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, decapitated much of its other leadership and long-range missiles, and took over southern Lebanon – Hezbollah was unwilling to cut a ceasefire deal without a deal with Gaza.

Israel’s blitzkrieg of Hezbollah changed that, and with the Lebanese terror group out of the war, the Houthis and Iran are basically now out of the war also.

The Houthis were always a sideshow, mostly acting at Iran’s urging so that Tehran would not need to act itself.

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For the Islamic Republic, the war has been a disaster as it has potentially uprooted its years of work to establish Hezbollah and Hamas as deterrents for Israel from attacking Iran directly. Also, Israel has destroyed most of its best air defense capabilities and significant portions of its ballistic missile production, leaving Tehran more vulnerable than it has been in a long time.

It has been long past time for Iran to cut its losses in order to try to rebuild its old strategy or quietly work on a new one.

If Hezbollah, Iran, and the Houthis are out, that really only leaves Gaza – which again is more of a political issue now than a military one – and the West Bank (technically, Syria and Iraqi militias are separate fronts, but they were never large threats and they will also stop attacks given Iran and Hezbollah dropping out.)

Unlike Gaza, the West Bank is as threatening as ever, and the trends of the threats there are much deeper and harder to cure than on other fronts.

Despite the IDF becoming far more aggressive with air strikes and other elements of its power in the West Bank since the summer, the number of deadly attacks has not really dropped compared to the average for 2024.

This is bad news, as the average for 2024 was far above the pre-war average.

In fact, most people have forgotten that the West Bank has been on fire with terror since March 2022.  

In fact, one of many reasons that the Gaza border was under protection on October 7, 2023, was that many forces that had been there in 2021 were shifted to the West Bank on and off, starting from the 2022 waves of terror.

For example, in 202,1, there were under 10 IDF battalions in the West Bank, but to maintain order starting from 2022, there were often between 25-30 battalions – some moved from the Gaza border.

And this was not even the wrong move.

In other words, there should have been way more troops on the Gaza border at all times and for many years, but comparatively, for much of 2022-2023, the West Bank was objectively the greater threat.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz have partially recognized this by finally approving a new Jordan border fence on Tuesday.

Iran has been trying harder than ever over the last two years to smuggle high-quality weapons into the West Bank to help Hamas and other terror groups commit more dangerous terror attacks.

This will continue to be a focus for Iran because it is an indirect way to confront Israel, and where it has higher plausible deniability than on other fronts because the terror actors will be Palestinian terror groups with whom there is no ceasefire anyway.

This new fence will be designed to better confront that threat.

However, the fence will take time, so keep a close eye on terror attempts in the coming months before it is up.

Even if a ceasefire is reached in Gaza, no past Gaza ceasefire has bound all terror groups in the West Bank.

And the West Bank also has much more spontaneous terror because there is no enforceable border.

Israeli settler villages and Palestinian villages are wrapped around each other in too many ways to fully police the area all of the time.

In other words, to solve Palestinian terror in the West Bank, there will also need to be a diplomatic element, something that no one has bothered discussing since this war started.

Until that diplomatic element moves forward, even with quiet on all of the other fronts, the West Bank will remain a near-term threat, and right now, probably Israel’s largest.