How the IDF Stopped Hamas from Establishing a New Foothold in the West Bank

On February 4 and 5, Israeli security forces entered the Aqbat Jaber refugee camp—located less than two miles outside the city of Jericho—to arrest terrorists, and were drawn into gunfights on both days. In the second incursion, five terrorists were killed, including two who had opened fire at diners in a restaurant last month in an attack that would have been fatal were it not for a jammed rifle. Yoni Ben Menachem explains the significance of these operations:

The city of Jericho is considered the quietest city in the West Bank and is located near a main traffic axis for Israeli and Arab vehicles going from the south to the north in the Jordan Valley. The presence of armed terrorists in the Jericho area is very dangerous for Israel from a security point of view, hence the importance of the IDF operation in Aqbat Jaber.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad are taking advantage of the Palestinian Authority’s weakness and unwillingness to fight terrorism to establish armed terrorist groups called “battalions” throughout Judea and Samaria. So far, about ten such terrorist groups have been established in the Nablus, Jenin, and Tulkarm areas.

Hamas’s Aqbat Jaber Battalion is an attempt by terrorist organizations to spread in the southern West Bank. The group grew in Jericho under the noses of the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces, who refrain from fighting against the armed terrorist groups, which forces the IDF and the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) to do the work in their place.

Hamas will try to hijack the city of Jericho and other cities such as Qalqilya and Tulkarm in its effort to provoke a new armed intifada against Israel. Smuggled weapons are flowing into the West Bank at an increasing rate through the border with Jordan and Israel’s security forces are finding it difficult to stop the phenomenon.

Read more at Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

More about: Hamas, IDF, Israeli Security, Palestinian terror, West Bank

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society