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.

Prime Minister Varadkar’s meretricious messaging concerning the freeing of a kidnapped child is only one example of the Irish government’s perverse reaction to Hamas’s assault on Israel. Varadkar has accused the IDF of pursuing “something approaching revenge” in Gaza, and compared the Israeli war effort to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. His parliament, meanwhile, came close to expelling the Israeli ambassador. Terry Glavin writes:

In a recent interview, . . . the retired Irish diplomat Niall Holohan put it this way: “We feel we have been victimized over the centuries. It’s part of our psyche—underneath it all we side with the underdog.” But there’s something else in the Irish psyche that’s impolite to mention in the comfy Dublin pubs and bistros. . . . Not a few of Ireland’s gallant and celebrated champions of the underdog, its heroes of Irish freedom, were vulgar anti-Semites and Nazi collaborators.

And in recent years, Irish Jews are commonly baited, harassed, and badgered every time there is some eruption in Israel involving Palestinian “resistance.”

The republican pamphleteer Arthur Griffith approved [of anti-Jewish agitation in Limerick in 1904], calling Jews “usurers and parasites.” Griffiths was one of the founders of Sinn Féin, in 1905, and he served as Sinn Féin’s president in 1911.

There was always a deep division in the Irish nationalist movement between Irish republicans who felt an affinity with the Jews owing to a shared history of dispossession and exile, and Catholic extremists who ranted and raved about Jews. Those Catholic shouters are still abroad, apparently unaware that for half a century, Catholic doctrine has established that anti-Semitism is a mortal sin.