Last weekend’s truck-ramming attack, which killed four Israeli soldiers, comes on the heels of more than a year of stabbings, car-rammings, and occasional shootings known in Arabic as the haba, or eruption. Consisting mainly of attacks by young people that require little advance planning or equipment, this wave of terror has been accompanied by thousands of incidents of mob-style violence. Nonetheless, the hopes of Hamas and some elements within the PLO that the haba will mushroom into a full-fledged third intifada have been unfulfilled, largely because Israel has found ways to respond systematically and without recourse to collective punishment. Violence is now on the decline, writes Ehud Yaari:

Palestinian elites’ efforts to capitalize on or direct the propagators of the haba toward catalyzing a larger and wider movement failed. No doubt that failure had something to do with the divisions and lack of political capacity within West Bank society. But a well-considered Israeli policy certainly played a role as well. The obvious Israeli priority [has been] to prevent a deepening and widening of the haba by avoiding actions that might draw the bulk of the Palestinian population into direct confrontation. . . .

[One component] of Israeli policy in dealing with the haba concerns social media. As Facebook—and to a lesser degree Twitter, YouTube, and other social-media platforms—became the favorite means of communication for would-be assailants and those inciting violence, Israeli intelligence diverted significant additional resources to monitoring the web, rapidly screening the flood of information to identify potential threats. The innovative software employed underwent continuous upgrades and adaptations, including methods to crack encrypted messages commonly used by Hamas and Hizballah operatives. . . .

[Another] component has been selective retaliation. In response to the haba, Israeli security agencies limited retaliatory measures to the immediate environment of the attackers. Family members of attackers, and sometimes their extended clans, were denied work permits in Israel, which are a major source of income throughout the West Bank. Some were also denied trade licenses and permits to enter Israel. Villages that produced several attacks were isolated, and temporarily put under lockdown with military checkpoints on all roads leading to them. . . .

Officers from the six Israeli territorial brigades in the West Bank also kept in constant communication with Palestinian notables, mukhtars (local leaders), and schoolmasters. . . . Gradually, these efforts helped create a powerful if quiet lobby among the Palestinian population against the expansion of the haba into something more pervasively violent. Towns and villages not drawn into the cycle of violence received various economic incentives, so carrots as well as sticks played a role in this highly targeted approach.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.