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Comment and Opinion

Daily Telegraph: Attack on Israelis in tram queue shows changing tactics of Palestinian militants, by David Blair

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A driver rams his car into a queue of people waiting for a tram, killing an Israeli baby girl of three months. The perpetrator had no weapon, training, funding or expertise – save the ability to drive a car – and yet he carried out a deadly terrorist attack.

This incident on Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem on Wednesday shows how Hamas and other radical Palestinian movements have changed their tactics as they seek to target Israel.

Once, suicide bombings were their favoured method of bloodshed. At the height of the Second Palestinian Intifada (or uprising) in 2002, suicide bombing were almost weekly occurrences, with 47 taking place in total. From that year onwards, however, the number of suicide attacks in Israel fell precipitously, with 23 explosions in 2003, 17 in 2004 and only three in 2006.

The last suicide bombing occurred in 2008; since then, not a single one has taken place in Israel.

How to explain the demise of this method of attack? In simple terms, Israel has taken extraordinary countermeasures designed to make suicide bombings impossible to execute. One military offensive after another has decimated Hamas in the West Bank, tearing its organisational backbone apart.

But the most important decision came as along ago as 2003, when Israel began sealing off the West Bank with a formidable security barrier. In some areas, this obstacle takes the form of a fence; in others, it amounts to a looming grey wall studded with watchtowers.

In whatever shape, the barrier now stretches for 272 miles, separating all of the Palestinian population centres in the West Bank from Israel’s cities. An equally formidable and much older wall also seals off the Gaza Strip. As a result, would-be suicide bombers find it almost impossible to enter Israel with a device, or the materials needed to make one.

Read the article in full at the Daily Telegraph.