CIA Director William Burns, returning from a trip which included meetings with Israeli officials and with Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas, has said he fears that current Israeli-Palestinian violence echoes the pattern of the Second Intifada.
- “I was a senior US diplomat 20 years ago during the Second Intifada,” said Burns, “and I’m concerned – as are my colleagues in the intelligence community – that a lot of what we’re seeing today has a very unhappy resemblance to some of those realities that we saw then too.”
- Meanwhile, five terrorists were confirmed killed in an IDF raid targeting members of a cell affiliated with Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades in the Aqabat Jaber refugee camp, near Jericho, on Monday.
- Troops entered the camp in pursuit of cell members believed to have carried out an attempted attack in Vered Yeriho, near the Almog junction, on January 28th, following which Israeli forces tightened restrictions around Jericho.
- The Shin Bet and IDF Intelligence Directorate discovered that those responsible were in an apartment in the camp and planning further attacks.
- Having identified the apartment, troops came under fire and responded in kind, killing gunmen, all of whom are thought to have belonged to the cell.
- Troops also discovered a significant and sophisticated arsenal of weapons, many of which – including rifles equipped with sniper scopes, Carlo submachine guns, and pistols – are comparable with the IDF’s own weapons.
- The targets of the mission having been killed, forces then withdrew from the camp in the face of hundreds of locals, some of them armed.
- No Israeli casualties were reported, while Palestinian media shared footage of a seemingly downed Israeli Sky Rider drone.
- The raid also netted the arrest of senior Hamas official Shaker Amara, as well as relatives of the Vered Yeriho attackers.
- Yesterday, Israeli officials indicated their belief that a car which exploded in Jenin in Monday evening was a prematurely detonated car bomb planned for use in an attack in revenge for the Jericho mission.
- In separate incidents, a 17-year-old member of the Lion’s Den terrorist group was killed during clashes with Israeli forces in Nablus on Tuesday, while 22 Palestinians were also arrested in the village of Burkin, west of Jenin. This follows the arrest by Israeli forces on Sunday of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) leader Khader Adnan in the village of Arrabeh, near Jenin, on Sunday.
- Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem predicted that the Jericho raid would “fuel a revolution” amongst Palestinians.
The Hamas Jericho cell, calling itself the Aqabat Jaber Battalion, is a new phenomenon, with the Vered Yeriho incident indicating an escalation in a city previously noted for its relative quiet.
- Last Saturday, the Aqabat Jaber Battalion publicly announced itself with a local parade and public statement.
- Monday’s IDF mission followed a previous raid targeting members of the cell last Saturday, in which at least 13 Palestinians were injured.
- While several arrests of cell members were secured in that mission, those responsible for the Vered Yeriho attack were not among them.
- In response to Saturday’s raid, the Aqabat Jaber Battalion announced a “days of rage” period, encouraging locals to initiate conflict with Israeli troops. “Let us all make them days of fire against the occupation,” a statement said, calling on Palestinians to “pour out their anger against the occupation.”
- In the attempted attack on January 28th, four members of the cell travelling in two cars sought to open fire close to a restaurant but fled when one of their M-16 rifles jammed.
- The gun failure averted what could have been a major terrorist attack, with over 30 people dining in the restaurant at the time.
- While the past year has seen multiple Israeli raids into the West Bank, as part of Operation Breakwater, such operations have tended to target unaffiliated individual suspects or else localised militia independent (at least formally) from both the Palestinian Authority’s dominant Fatah faction and Hamas. An operation targeting such a well-resourced Hamas cell inside the West Bank is therefore unusual.
- The location of the raid is also significant. Jericho, in the PA-run Area A has previously been considered a place of comparative quiet and relatively secure PA control. Such a significant Hamas base of operations, together with Israel’s assessment that its neutralising required a unilateral operation, provide further proof of the decline in the PA’s influence in the West Bank and its ability to be considered a reliable security partner.
- The PA also opted to suspend formal security cooperation with Israel in the wake of the IDF’s raid in Jenin on January 27th, though informal cooperation is known to have been ongoing since then.
- The operation was notable for being conducted not by one of the IDF units usually designated with such a mission, but by its gender-integrated Lions of the Jordan Valley Battalion, formed in 2014.
- The chief of the military’s Central Command, Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs, commended the “commanders and troops who led the battle” as “an example of professionalism and leadership.” The operation will doubtless signify an important endorsement of mixed battalions at a time when they are under fire from ultra-Orthodox political figures.
- Egypt has continued mediation between Israel and the Palestinian factions. On Saturday, PIJ Secretary-General Ziyad al-Nakhaleh met in Cairo with Abbas Kamel, Director of the Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate to discuss recent violence, especially in the PIJ stronghold of Jenin, while Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is due to arrive in Cairo shortly.
Israel is braced for a violent response from Hamas.
- With several members of the cell killed or arrested, quiet from Jericho might reveal that Hamas’s presence in the city has been fatally degraded.