Israel Launches Major Operation against Iran’s West Bank Proxies Andrew McCarthy
I’ve been contending that, rather than launch a major war it would lose in devastating measure, Iran has been conducting calibrated operations against Israel — trying to terrorize, exhaust, and effectively contract the territory of Israel by a thrum of violence on multiple fronts, knowing the Biden administration’s obsession about avoiding “escalation” of the conflict constrains Israel’s response.
The latest hot spot is Judea and Samaria — the West Bank, in which 3 million Palestinians are governed semiautonomously by the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas (now in the 19th year of his four-year term), and where jihadist Iran backs such proxies as the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas (which controls Gaza but maintains a foreboding presence in the West Bank).
Israel has now commenced major combat operations against these jihadist strongholds. On Wednesday, the Israel Defense Forces deployed hundreds of troops, supported by air power, in an effort to dismantle terror platforms.
To recap, on October 7, Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza in the southwest, where it has been supplied via Egypt and where the fighting continues. Within 24 hours of Hamas’s attack, Hezbollah stepped up strikes across Israel’s northern border from its bases in Lebanon, where Iran has supplied it with over 150,000 missiles, thanks in part to Iran’s long-standing presence in neighboring Syria, propping up the barbaric Assad regime. In the interim, from over the southeast horizon, Israel has been subjected to continuous aerial aggression — hundreds of attacks — by the Houthis, Iran’s proxies in Yemen.
Concurrently, Iran has been turning the West Bank into yet another front, this one on Israel’s east, capitalizing on weapons-smuggling routes through Jordan. The Long War Journal reports that at least nine terrorists were killed in fighting that surged on Monday, with IDF forces “dismantling explosives planted under the roads, and confiscating large quantities of weapons.”
The Israeli operations intensified today, according to the New York Times. As usual, the Times highlights Israel’s “significant escalation,” its killing of about a dozen Palestinians (most if not all of whom were jihadists), and its arrests since October 7 of “thousands of Palestinians suspected of involvement in the armed groups,” before getting around to observing:
The raid comes as U.S., Israeli and Iranian officials have said that Tehran is trying to flood the West Bank with weapons. The covert operation, employing intelligence operatives, militants and criminal gangs, has heightened concerns that Iran is seeking to turn the territory into another flashpoint in its longstanding conflict with Israel.
As with its Obama-Biden-administration predecessor, nothing rankles the Biden-Harris administration more than Israeli uses of force in the West Bank, no matter how justifiable. They illustrate how delusional it is to depict the hopelessly corrupt and weak Palestinian Authority as a “peace partner” for the holy grail of a “two-state solution.”
The daring defensive actions over the last month — eliminating Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, continuing to roll up Hamas in Gaza, carrying out retaliatory aerial strikes against Houthi strongholds in Yemen’s Hudayah Port, conducting a preemptive strike in Lebanon as Hezbollah was about to fire thousands of missiles, and now the raids against Iranian-backed jihadists in the West Bank — indicate that Israel senses it has a freer hand. President Biden is largely AWOL, and Vice President Harris is straining (with a big assist from the media) to distance herself from the administration — of which, you may be surprised to hear, she is the No. 2 official and has been for almost four years.
Still, Iran, for all the losses and embarrassments it has sustained in recent weeks, is steadily stepping up the pressure, though stopping short of provoking a significant counterattack on its own territory. The mullahs calculate that Israel won’t attempt such a thing absent American acquiescence, which they are confident won’t be forthcoming from Biden and Harris. The U.S. has deployed significant naval assets to discourage Iran and its proxies from going too far — but that won’t stop them, and the administration won’t abide any “escalation.”
For Israel, it’s now a four-front war. At least.
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