On Friday, a Palestinian stabbed an Israeli soldier in Hebron, one of the latest incidents in a general uptick in West Bank terrorist activity since the beginning of 2022. Danny Zaken contends that the violence is in fact a result of the crumbling of confidence in the Palestinian Authority (PA), which is rapidly losing control over the areas for which it is responsible. A key indicator of this loss of trust, Zaken writes, are recent protests by Palestinians who work within Israel’s pre-1967 borders:

They are protesting against the transfer of their salaries through the banks rather than in cash, as was the case until now. Their lack of trust in the PA causes the workers to oppose the move, which is supposed to help them. . . . Last week I spoke to Amjad, a Palestinian laborer from the Hebron area who has been working in Israel for years and I asked him about his opposition to transferring his salary through the banks. “You [Israelis] are cooperating with the corruption of the Palestinian Authority, and so are the Americans. Every dime that enters the Palestinian Authority goes to the corrupt.”

These harsh sentiments are echoed in countless conversations, and they are completely justified; investigations by international media over the years substantiate the complaints.

The primary beneficiaries of this corruption, as Amjad himself asserts, are the PA president Mahmoud Abbas and his sons. And this isn’t the only problem, according to Zaken:

Another reason for the escalation in the security situation is the approaching end of [Abbas’s] rule. Abbas is over eighty-seven, has postponed presidential elections more than once on various pretexts, and his status, as well as the status of the leadership of the PA as a whole, is being undermined. All this is being expressed in the deterioration of the rule of law.

In Hebron, clan battles involving gunfights have been going on for months with deaths on both sides, and the Palestinian police are powerless.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.