Maj. Gen. Roni Numa, head of Central Command and the Israeli sovereign over the territories of Judea and Samaria, held a background briefing on Nov. 24 with Israeli military correspondents.

Numa originally comes from the Paratroopers Brigade with 30 years of combat experience under his belt, including command of the elite undercover Duvdevan unit and the air force’s elite Shaldag unit. But this experience has not prepared him to cope with the bizarre terror wave that has been shaking up the territories and Israel proper in the last weeks — terror involving occasional knife stabbings, car-ramming attacks, improvised shootings and scattered demonstrations. Between Oct. 1 and Nov. 29, the terror attacks have claimed the lives of 22 people. More than 100 Palestinians, most of whom were the assailants themselves, were killed in those events.

Numa — like the entire Israel Defense Forces (IDF) — refuses to call the current situation an intifada. The military classification of the events is “a limited uprising,” because the Palestinian masses are sitting on the fence and are not involved in the violence. The Palestinian Authority’s (PA’s) security apparatus continues to fight the terror and tries to prevent it, the Fattah-affiliated Tanzim militia still holds their fire and the cells that have been involved in shooting attacks are not organized and do not operate as part of an official organizational structure. In addition to the strong incitement that is always present in the Palestinian media and social media networks, Hamas is mainly responsible for instigating the grass-roots terror from their base in the Gaza Strip. Also, the hysteria fomented by the northern branch of the Israeli Islamic Movement, which was outlawed on Nov. 17, in regard to the Temple Mount, has contributed its part as well.

During the briefing, Numa presented the approach of the IDF: Israel should react with restraint and attempt to create incentives encouraging the Palestinian population to continue to distance themselves from terror, consider an increase in work permits and strengthen the PA’s security forces. Numa’s statements were subsequently misinterpreted by some journalists who rushed to publish online reports saying that the IDF has proposed to provide weapons and armored vehicles to the PA in the midst of the terror wave to allow them to enter the refugee camps and fight terror. Before the terror wave began, Numa had, in fact, talked about this plan, which was submitted to the political echelons, but it was frozen. He was in favor of implementing some parts of the program once quiet had returned to Judea and Samaria for a period of several consecutive weeks, as a kind of incentive to restore law and order.

Read the article in full at Al-Monitor.