On November 21, a Hamas operative opened fire in Jerusalem, killing the twenty-six-year-old immigrant Eli Kay and injuring four others. On Saturday, another terrorist stabbed a civilian. These attacks come on the heels of others—not to mention the much larger one planned by Hamas in the West Bank and foiled by the IDF in October. Alex Fishman warns that these are signs of worse threats to come, and he fears that Israel is playing into the terrorist group’s hands by not taking the fight to its enclave in Gaza:

During the six months that passed since the May conflict between Israel and Gaza’s militant factions, the Israeli government has been patting itself on the back for having allegedly achieved “deterrence” against the terrorists.
This false sense of security is akin to the feeling that was prevalent in Israel after the Second Lebanon War in 2006, when the government believed Hizballah was left with nothing but a few rusting missiles.

Hamas, meanwhile, has grown stronger over the past six months, and has in fact worked tirelessly to replenish its weapons depots following the war in May. The terrorist organization has also started building and using advanced weaponry, such as UAVs and drones, and is experimenting with different kinds of missiles. Only recently Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system shot down a drone with explosives attached to it over the Mediterranean Sea. Gaza is clearly readying itself for another war.

The current calm, however, allows [Gaza’s ruler] Yahya Sinwar to strengthen Hamas’s militant wing, where the majority of the organizations’ finances have been funneled to over the last six months. For Sinwar, improving the lives of Gaza’s citizens is nothing but a bonus to help him maintain control over the enclave and its people. And for Hamas as a whole, the calm is nothing but a tool to stall until it’s ready for another round of fighting against Israel.

Meanwhile, the current attempts by the United States and Egypt to reconcile Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah with Hamas in order to form a Palestinian unity government that would reach an agreement with Israel, are nothing but a fever dream of the U.S. State Department and Egyptian intelligence.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”