A top Israeli intelligence official said Monday he believed the escalating situation in the West Bank would only get worse in the coming year and that Israel was not merely facing a “wave of terror,” as many officials have described it.
The head of the Israel Defense Forces’ Military Intelligence Research Department, Brig. Gen. Amit Saar, said the rising violence in the West Bank will be Israel’s second most challenging issue in 2023, after Iran.
Speaking at a conference hosted by Gazit, a military think tank, Saar said: “People can say nothing has changed… the terror is seasonal, every few years we have a wave and afterward it calms down and comes back. There are people in the security establishment who believe this to be the case, but I think otherwise.
“I think we need to examine what we have seen in recent months — not through the [prism of the] number of attacks, but the causes,” he said.
“We are seeing the foundations that allowed us to manage the conflict beginning to falter. We are far from being able to solve the conflict, but there were foundations allowing us to manage the conflict at a relatively low cost for years,” Saar said.
“These foundations in the past year, and heading into 2023, are going to become unstable,” he said.
Saar said the Palestinian Authority has lost its legitimacy with young Palestinians, and there is easy access to firearms in the West Bank, enabling repeated shooting attacks. The IDF has recorded at least 281 shooting attacks and attempts against Israeli civilians and soldiers in the West Bank this year, compared to 91 last year.
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