The growing wave of terror attacks in Judea and Samaria is increasingly looking like the situation in the days of the Second Intifada, when shooting attacks were an almost daily occurrence in that part of Israel.
The new terror wave appears to have been orchestrated by Iran, which, through its proxies Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, is recruiting Palestinian Arabs on social media and encouraging them to carry out shootings and other terror attacks.
Until recently, most terror attacks were widely regarded as the work of “lone wolves,” Arab individuals acting on their own initiative.
However, now it has become clear that the Iranian axis is trying to establish a new front in Israel’s Biblical heartland. The Israeli military has changed its strategy and is now increasingly treating this new terror wave as an asymmetric war with nightly raids on Palestinian terror hotbeds and the use of drones, as well as electronic warfare.
The number of shooting and stabbing attacks over the past month rose to 11 on Sunday when a bus full of Israeli soldiers was fired upon on Highway 90 in the Jordan Valley.
A car carrying three Arabs followed the bus and overtook it at the Adam junction, after which two of them opened fire.
Seven people were injured on the bus, one of them seriously, and it was a miracle that no one was killed because the bullets went straight through the windshield next to the driver’s seat.
The terrorists then tried to set the bus ablaze by using a Molotov cocktail, but were unable to do so because the improvised firebomb exploded in their own car, causing a fire that set the clothing of the terrorists alight, after which they were arrested with severe burn wounds.
The third terrorist, a Palestinian Arab from the Jordan Valley, did not catch fire and managed to flee, after which soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched a manhunt, believing the perpetrator to have fled to the northern Samaria town of Jenin.
The attack on the bus carrying IDF soldiers in the Jordan Valley was the first in many years. The area has always been considered fairly safe, and Highway 90 has been used by many Israelis seeking alternative routes to the traffic-ridden roads in central Israel.
Later on Sunday night, an IDF unit in Samaria was attacked by Palestinian terrorists who threw an improvised bomb at the soldiers, wounding four of them.
A short time later, Palestinian terrorists in Judea attacked the tomb of Jewish matriarch Rachel using an improvised explosive device and fireworks that caused a large fire.
Hamas and PIJ have recently stepped up their activities in Judea and especially Samaria, most likely on orders from the regime in Iran, which has openly admitted that it views Judea and Samaria as “a new front.”
This was recently stated in so many words by Hossein Salami, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Iran who was quoted by Fars News, a news site with close ties to the IRGC.
According to Fars News, Salami said Iran is working to open a multi-front war against Israel with one of those fronts in Judea and Samaria, where, according to Salami, Iran is succeeding in supplying Palestinian terrorists with weapons despite the IDF’s permanent presence and the security barrier that Israel built since the Second Intifada.
Israel is well aware that Iran is behind the current wave of terror and that the regime in Tehran was also responsible for the two-day war with PIJ in Gaza that the IDF started last month after there was evidence of new PIJ attacks on targets in southern Israel.
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