As ‘attacks beget attacks’ in West Bank, army must break cycle of terror
Even as tensions calm slightly in Gaza, Hamas is ramping up attacks in the West Bank, and lone copycats also pose a threat
Judah Ari Gross is The Times of Israel's religions and Diaspora affairs correspondent.
The last quarter of 2018 has seen a significant rise in the level of violence in the West Bank, with growing concerns of another outbreak like that in late 2015 and early 2016, which saw regular stabbing, shooting and car-ramming attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers.
This past week has been particularly deadly, and the military is engaged in a delicate balancing act — launching a large-scale effort to interrupt the cycle of violence in an attempt to stave off a wider conflict in the West Bank, but at the same time trying to limit the potential to inflame already heightened tensions in the restive region.
On Sunday, Palestinian terrorists opened fire at a group of Israelis standing outside the Ofra settlement, injuring seven people, including a 30-weeks pregnant woman whose baby was delivered prematurely and died three days later. An assailant stabbed two border guards in the Old City of Jerusalem on Thursday, lightly injuring them, before he was shot dead. Also on Thursday, a gunman shot dead two Israeli soldiers and seriously injured a third serviceman and a civilian woman at a bus stop outside the Givat Assaf outpost, near Ofra. And a Palestinian attacker stabbed a soldier and bashed his head with a rock, seriously injuring him, at a military outpost near the Beit El settlement on Friday.
On Thursday, Israeli troops also shot dead a 58-year-old Palestinian man who they said attempted to ram them with his car in the town of el-Bireh, outside Ramallah. The man’s family denies that he tried to deliberately hit the soldiers with his car, and the military is reportedly investigating the possibility that it was indeed an accident.
Adding to the past week’s heightened tensions, Israeli security forces shot dead a suspected terrorist, Ashraf Na’alowa, who is believed to have committed a shooting attack in the Barkan industrial zone in October, killing two of his Israeli co-workers; the army said he opened fire at the troops who came to arrest him in the city of Nablus in the predawn hours of Thursday morning. Soldiers also arrested some of the terrorists responsible for the Ofra shooting on Wednesday night — one was also killed — while others are still believed to be at large.
But the escalation of violence in the West Bank has been coming for several months.
Following a rocky May, which saw an increase in attacks apparently tied to the transfer of the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the summer was relatively calm, with between 64 and 88 acts of violence each month, mostly in the forms of Molotov cocktails thrown at Israeli cars and other low-level attacks, according to figures from the Shin Bet security service.
Beginning in September, this started to change, with more and more attacks recorded each month in the West Bank. November saw over 100, according to the Shin Bet, and December appears to be on track to have even more and deadlier attacks.
The military is also in the midst of several other manhunts in the West Bank. Except for Thursday’s Old City stabbing, all the assailants managed to flee the scene of the attacks.
This tendency of one attack to lead to a second is generally attributed to three main sources. In some cases, it is the result of established terror groups, notably Hamas, taking advantage of a volatile situation and directing operatives to carry out attacks. There are also lone copycats with no ties to organized groups — often young men from bad family situations — but who are inspired by an act of terrorism and set out to commit their own. And there are acts of revenge, a brother or cousin of an assailant recently shot dead by Israeli troops who commit attacks as a form of retribution.
The past week has seen the first two, according to Israeli defense officials.
The Hamas terror group, which has scaled down its violent activities in the Gaza Strip as it tries to reach a ceasefire agreement with Israel, has been stepping up its efforts in the West Bank.
“Hamas is the most violent group in [the West Bank], and it is trying to carry out terror attacks all the time,” a senior officer in the IDF Central Command said Thursday.
The Israeli military said it believes a Hamas cell conducted the terror attack in Ofra on Sunday and that the terror group may have also committed the shooting in nearby Givat Assaf on Thursday.
Other attacks this week appeared to have been committed by lone assailants with no direct ties to terror groups.
Military officials and analysts explain the increased violence of the past week as “terror attacks beget terror attacks” — or in Hebrew, “pigua rodef pigua”: that one incident often prompts another and another, until the pattern can be broken.
The Israel Defense Forces is now attempting to do just that, though it is no easy task, with the potential for violence to escalate if either too much or not enough action is taken.
In its effort to both hunt the terrorists who fled and break the cycle of violence, the IDF has sent additional infantry battalions to the West Bank and established a dedicated command unit to spearhead the searches.
The military has set up checkpoints at the entrances and exits to Ramallah and other nearby towns and villages; carried out extensive arrest raids in the West Bank, arresting some 37 Hamas members, including senior leaders; and has stationed additional troops around the West Bank’s roadways and inside settlements to both prevent attacks and respond more effectively to those that do occur.
However, these moves by the army represent a delicate balancing act, as these additional troops and their increased interaction with Palestinians also represent more targets for Palestinian assailants and added potential for friction and clashes.
The IDF and its outgoing Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot tout the importance of differentiating between the general Palestinian population and violent actors within it, and as a result the military typically refrains from mass closures of Palestinian cities and towns, the imposition of curfews and other forms of collective punishments.
Instead, the IDF generally seeks to allow the majority of Palestinians to go about their daily routines and minimize potential sources of conflict.
These policies become more difficult to maintain amid periods of heightened tensions and violence, when settlers and politicians, often those on the right, demand the IDF take more and harsher action against Palestinians.
On Thursday, the far-right Tekuma party, which is partnered with Education Minister Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home, threatened to pull its two members from the ruling coalition — and thus end its slim 61-59 majority over the opposition — if the government did not put in place new measures to protect West Bank settlements and their residents.
Settler activists also demonstrated outside the Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem on Thursday night, calling for more forceful action in the West Bank.
Individual right-wing extremists can also put pressure on the IDF to change tack by conducting so-called “price tag” attacks on Arabs — in the form of violence against either people or property — which are meant to signify to the military that they will take action against Palestinians if it doesn’t.
This type of reprisal attack by Jewish extremists may have already been seen late Thursday night, when two young men viciously attacked a bus driver in the West Bank settlement of Modiin Illit after they heard him speaking Arabic. Police said they were still investigating the attack to determine the motive.
