Yonah Jeremy Bob
Jerusalem Post, June 19, 2023
“… the current strategy seems to be: we have no idea how to end the waves of terror, but are also afraid to do a bigger operation or to call it a bigger operation.”
On Monday, the IDF and other security forces’ operations in Jenin in the northern West Bank got out of hand.
Will the IDF finally be drawn into a larger operation to clean-house in Jenin?
They got out of hand both because dozens of Palestinians were wounded and five killed in order to arrest two suspected terrorists – a result that few would call a success. The operation got out of hand because the IDF suffered seven wounded, because an armored vehicle was badly damaged and because around seven vehicles were stuck for several hours. It was also out of hand because the IDF had to use a helicopter firing missiles, even if the missile was fired into an open area.
This is also far from the first operation that went sideways in Jenin.
Since 2022, many incidents led to harm to IDF soldiers. Since 2022 and with several specific major incidents since January of this year, many incidents have led to harm to IDF soldiers and to large volumes of Palestinians, which did not seem worth the limited target of the original operation.
The suspected terrorists were wanted, but they were not top officials like the six Islamic Jihad officials in Gaza for whom assassinating them and even some ancillary nearby civilians could be more clearly justified and make sense.
All of the above suggests that the IDF has not only lost control over Jenin, but has lost the capability to reliably run in and out of Jenin with supremacy of control which has characterized the West Bank to date as opposed to Gaza. In responding to criticism, senior IDF officials cited the increasing number of instances where hundreds of IDF and security forces have gone into West Bank areas to arrest someone or demolish a house.
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