Emanuel Fabian
The Times of Israel, Dec. 27, 2022
“Unlike Israel’s other frontiers — with Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria — its border with Jordan is relatively unguarded due to its sheer length, and lacks significant fencing in many areas, making it an obvious channel for large-scale smuggling.”
In the evening of October 3, soldiers monitoring surveillance cameras spotted a man picking up a suspicious package at the border with Jordan, close to the Palestinian West Bank village of az-Zubaidat. The soldiers were expecting the man — a courier in a large gun-smuggling ring — after weeks of undercover intelligence-gathering by police.
The soldiers reported what they had seen to a joint military-police operations center, which dispatched officers and troops to the scene. When they came to arrest the courier, a second man spotted by troops in the area took off in a vehicle. The first man, a Palestinian from az-Zubaidat, was caught carrying 61 handguns and an assault rifle. The second man, an Israeli from the Bedouin town of Basmat Tab’un, another member of the smuggling network, was detained by police after a brief chase and the car he was driving was impounded.
The success of the operation, one of many in recent months, was far from a given. In past years, the weapons smuggler might have slipped into Israel or the West Bank unnoticed. Or, if he was spotted, soldiers may have only had a superior to alert; by the time the information filtered through the chain of command to the relevant police or Shin Bet officials, the smuggler would have been long gone, his guns distributed to any criminals or terrorists who were willing to pay.
But today, Israeli authorities say they are beginning to gain the upper hand in a relentless battle to stymie the mass smuggling of arms into Israel and the West Bank, where the weapons are helping fuel an uptick in attacks by terror groups and deadly criminal activity within Israel’s Arab communities.
Efforts have ramped up against the gun-running operations following a “deep understanding by decision-makers — both the police and the government — that the Jordanian border is the most intensive source of fuel for crime in the Arab community, and for terror,” said Chief Superintendent Ronen Kalfon, who leads a police anti-smuggling unit known as Magen. …Source