Deadly terror shooting tests relative calm in southern West Bank
Senior IDF officer says Hebron area’s more stable economy and sustained military presence have so far prevented outbreaks like those seen in other parts of the territories
Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian is The Times of Israel's military correspondent
SUSYA, West Bank — A deadly terror attack near Hebron this week shattered the relative calm of the southern West Bank, amid sky-high tensions across other areas of the territory for the past year and a half.
Since the spring of 2022, the West Bank has seen a rise in Palestinian shooting attacks against Israeli civilians and troops, near-nightly arrest raids by the military in Palestinian towns and villages, and an uptick in attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians.
Only the southern West Bank has remained relatively calm during this period, with few terror attacks, little to no major conflict between the army and Palestinians, and only a handful of violent incidents involving settlers.
That was until Monday morning, when two Palestinian brothers allegedly opened fire at an Israeli car at the Beit Hagai junction, south of Hebron, killing 42-year-old Batsheva Nigri and seriously wounding 40-year-old Aryeh Leib Gottlieb.
The suspects were arrested by Israeli forces less than 24 hours after the attack, with no resistance, and Israeli settlers did not carry out any retaliatory attacks, seemingly drawing the case to a close. But military officials still fear that the ongoing escalation could spread to the mostly calm southern West Bank.
The southern West Bank was not always this relatively peaceful. In 2014, after Hamas terrorists kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers in the Etzion bloc — south of Jerusalem — the Israel Defense Forces launched a widespread arrest operation, focusing mostly on the Hebron area, eventually uncovering the bodies of Eyal Yifrah, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, 16. The fallout from the incident sparked a major war in the Gaza Strip.
Last week, before Monday’s shooting attack, Maj. Idan Amran, the head of operations in the IDF’s Judea Regional Brigade, which covers Hebron and the surrounding area, cautioned that the relative calm there amid the increase in violence elsewhere is not a given.
Compared to the northern West Bank, the economy in the southern part is much stronger, leading fewer Palestinians to turn to terror, Amran told The Times of Israel on the sidelines of an event marking 35 years since the establishment of the Judea Regional Brigade.
“Hebron is very strong in terms of the economy — about over 40 percent of the gross national product of the Palestinians is from Hebron alone — so there is a definite economic interest here,” he said.
“If you enter the middle of Hebron today with one [military] vehicle, you can find yourself on a two-hour tour without a single stone being thrown at you, but if you enter Jenin [in the northern West Bank] now, you can see for yourself what is happening, even if it is a nighttime operation without many forces,” he said.
This was seen during the arrest of the two suspected Palestinian terrorists early Tuesday morning in Hebron. The pair did not resist, and no clashes were reported.
Palestinians in the northern West Bank, especially Jenin, have shown fierce resistance to Israeli military operations, responding with gunfire and large explosive devices targeting troops. The IDF launched a major two-day operation in the city last month in an attempt to clamp down on what military officials call a hotbed of terror.
The Judea Regional Brigade further south, meanwhile, is not only the calmest but also the largest in terms of size among the six regional brigades in the West Bank. As of August, the brigade had five battalions and one Border Police platoon. Typically there are only 13 battalions in the West Bank, though over the past 18 months, that number has fluctuated because of the IDF’s ongoing anti-terror offensive, reaching a height of 26 battalions in October 2022.
“Go to the Menashe Brigade [in the northern West Bank] — the ‘hot’ area that is being talked about all the time now — there are only about four settlements there… Here a platoon [alone] guards around 20 settlements — a platoon, not even a battalion,” Amran said.
Aside from the economic factor, he suggested that the IDF’s frequent activity in the southern West Bank has helped keep matters calm, rather than increase tensions.
“The way we assess it is that we operate every day at every hour in the villages, carrying out arrests, preventative actions and we don’t neglect any certain area. There is no place [immune to] the activity of our forces… There are no tools here now that [Palestinians can use] to fortify terrorism,” he said.
Amran noted that the Palestinian Authority security forces also operate frequently within areas under its jurisdiction, unlike in the northern West Bank.
In the northern West Bank, the PA has been accused by Israel of neglecting areas such as Jenin and Nablus, enabling Palestinians to form armed groups and execute organized attacks in addition to resisting any attempt by Israeli forces to carry out arrest raids. For its part, the PA argues that intensified IDF activity in the northern West Bank has made it harder for it to reassert control there because Ramallah is subsequently seen as collaborating with Israel in its crackdown against Palestinians.
“There’s barely any resistance here,” Amran said. “It’s the economy, and the fact that we operate to prevent [terror] from growing.”
He said the southern West Bank had been relatively calm since the “explosion” of the 2014 mass-arrest operation amid the search for the three slain teenagers: “We mowed the lawn, cut down most of the Hamas infrastructure… and since then, we have retained it.”
Securing Hebron is ‘very challenging’
Much of the Judea brigade’s forces today are centered in and around Hebron, a city of some 215,000 Palestinians.
Hebron differs from other Palestinian West Bank cities in that it is home to a Jewish settler community, numbering roughly 1,000, that, per the 1997 Hebron Agreement between Israel and the PA, lives in an area under Israeli control — about 20 percent of the city, known as H2. The community has existed for hundreds of years, though with several gaps during the 20th century.
Providing security for the settlers of Hebron is a “very challenging” and complex task, Amran said, noting that the Jewish enclaves are completely surrounded by Palestinian neighborhoods, potentially enabling attacks to be carried out with ease.
“The challenge is so close…you can find a Jewish home and next to it a Palestinian home, there’s no fence, no wall. In all other areas [in the West Bank], there’s a fence surrounding a community,” he said.
“And therefore we have very intense activity of our forces in the area. There are many more posts compared to other areas… Just within the tiny area of the Jewish community, there is an entire battalion,” Amran said.
He added that there was an advantage to having such a significant military presence permanently within a Palestinian-majority city.
“It enables our forces to operate all day… It’s not like if you go into Jenin and the locals are surprised by the entry. Here the soldiers walk around the city all day. The Palestinian population is used to seeing our forces,” he said.
Hebron’s settlers are also among the most extremist in the West Bank, regularly clashing with neighboring Palestinians and squatting in buildings in an effort to expand their foothold in the city. The settlers’ presence has also led to a tightening of Palestinians’ freedom of movement in H2.
Crackdown on settler violence
Amid the rise in Palestinian terrorism over the past year and a half, there has also been an upsurge in settler attacks against Palestinians. These included a number of instances in which hundreds of Jewish Israelis entered Palestinian towns to riot, setting fire to property and assaulting residents, in what some IDF officials have branded “pogroms.” Several Palestinians have been killed, some under unclear circumstances, during those settler attacks.
The vast majority of these violent incidents, which the military admits it failed to control, occurred in the northern and central West Bank.
By contrast, such incidents in the southern West Bank have largely been limited to scuffles between settlers and Palestinians, some with injuries, and a number of cases of vandalism. Still, in September 2021, before the current wave of violence in the region, dozens of masked settlers threw stones at Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills area, smashing cars and injuring at least twelve, including a three-year-old boy.
Residents of Palestinian villages located near some of the southern West Bank’s illegal outposts have also long complained of intimidation by settlers who seek to prevent territorial contiguity between Palestinian towns.
Amran said that unlike the violent attacks by settlers against Palestinians in the central and northern West Bank in recent months, the Judea brigade had managed to end such confrontations quickly before they spiraled further. “This region is drastically different from others. You won’t see large, mass friction. It’s not common here.”
“I can tell you that when we encounter such an incident, even on a much smaller scale, we act accordingly. We send police, Border Police and the IDF to put a stop to the incident. We have a list of where and when incidents occur, and we deal with it, without waiting around for the next incident,” he said. “We try to end each such incident completely.”
Despite the relative calm in the southern West Bank, Amran said the Judea Regional Brigade was still preparing for the worst, be it violence by Palestinians or Israelis. “We are always preparing, always talking about what could happen. There are always people who want things to happen, and we try our best to make sure to prevent this.”
Following Monday’s deadly shooting, the head of the Judea Regional Brigade, Col. Yishai Rosilio, said his forces had failed to prevent the attack.
“Yesterday, we had a serious terror attack in the brigade’s area… We as a brigade, did not manage to prevent this terror attack,” Rosilio said in a video statement Tuesday.
Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, the commander of the IDF Central Command, similarly took responsibility for the attack in a press conference on Monday, hours after the shooting.
“We are trying to get ahead of the enemy and thwart [their plans]. Most of the time we succeed. Today, and this week, we didn’t,” Fox said, alluding as well to the killing of an Israeli father and son in Huwara in the northern West Bank on Saturday.
Responding to a question by The Times of Israel regarding fears that the ongoing terror wave, which has mostly centered on the northern West Bank, is spreading to its south, Fox said that the military had foiled numerous attacks in the Hebron area already.
“It is true that most of the overt terror in the recent period has been in the Samaria area,” Fox said, referring to the northern West Bank by its biblical name. “But here too, we have foiled dozens of attacks, if not more, including terror cells in the Judea region [in the southern West Bank].”
“I very much hope we can improve the situation in northern Samaria too, and in Judea, and foil terror before it is carried out,” he added.
