The terrorist attack Friday near the Palestinian village of Tell in Samaria diverted the Israeli security establishment from its intensive focus on Iran. What the media dryly described as "heightened alert" and "vigilance" was, in practice, a state of maximum readiness for the resumption of the campaign against Iran.
Israeli officials believed the Americans might strike overnight between Friday and Saturday. For now, the attacks appear to have been postponed, though not necessarily for long. Faced with a choice between a ceasefire to allow talks and a broad resumption of the campaign, US President Donald Trump is giving the former a chance, but appears inclined toward the latter.
His meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington this week is likely to focus on coordinating policy on Iran, as the two did ahead of the previous campaigns in June last year and February this year.
Netanyahu wants the campaign to resume, in the hope that the regime in Tehran will fall. The security establishment is skeptical, however, because there is no magic formula that can guarantee results different from those achieved in the last round.
After Israel failed to bring down the regime by eliminating its leaders and senior military and security officials, it urged the Americans to try doing so through systematic attacks on Iran's national infrastructure. The hope was that, without electricity and water, the public would take to the streets and finish the job. The Americans objected, fearing a humanitarian catastrophe, and in any case no one could guarantee that the plan would produce the desired outcome.
Meanwhile, the security establishment was drawn into events in Judea and Samaria following the attack in which Benayahu Malt and Maj. Yuval Ezra were murdered. An Israel Defense Forces investigation found that a group entered the Palestinian village without coordination and became involved in a confrontation with local residents, which quickly escalated into violence. An IDF force and the civilian security squad from the nearby community of Havat Gilad arrived at the scene.
During the confrontation, the community security coordinator's rifle was seized and used to shoot and kill the two men and seriously wound a third. IDF troops wounded the terrorists, who fled to Nablus. They were later arrested by the IDF's elite Duvdevan counterterrorism unit at a hospital in the city and transferred for questioning by the Shin Bet security agency.
The grave incident requires a thorough examination and lessons to be learned. The IDF must ask itself how capable it truly is of securing the area and what steps it should now take, given the disturbing increase in terrorist attacks over the past week.
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