Iran's War Against Israel - From the West Bank
by Khaled Abu Toameh • August 28, 2024 at 5:00 am
Armed and funded by Iran, the "battalions," whose members are affiliated with PIJ, Hamas and the ruling Fatah faction headed by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, began operating in the northern West Bank more than three years ago.
"Iran seeks as a strategic objective to surround Israel with a crescent of active fronts maintained by Iran and supported by Islamist client militias. As part of this, the [Iranian] regime is seeking to find a way to add an eastern component to this crescent – through Jordan to the West Bank... Tehran has succeeded in establishing and maintaining an arms route in which military materiel, brought from Iran into Lebanon, is then transported across the Syrian-Lebanese border, via Jordan, into the West Bank. "The maintenance of this route is of strategic importance to Iran. It is intended, over time, to flood the West Bank with weaponry, and by so doing, to eventually make this area a third front in the ongoing long war against Israel." — Jonathan Spyer, journalist, expert on radical Islamic groups, Jerusalem Post, July 5, 2024.
The PA's failure to crack down on the "battalions" means that Iran now has a small army in the West Bank. It will not be long before members of this army attack Israel in the same way as the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led invasion of Israel, in which 1,200 Israelis were murdered, with many raped, tortured and burned alive. In addition, more than 240 Israelis, including babies, women and the elderly, were abducted to the Gaza Strip, where 109 of them are still being held as hostages.
Those who persist in advocating for the establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel must take into consideration that doing so would lead to the rise of more Iran-backed "battalions" in the West Bank and other areas over which the PA is given control. Since the gunmen are frequently praised as "heroes" by many Palestinians, neither Abbas nor anyone who replaces him would have the courage to take them on.
Even if Abbas does go back to the Gaza Strip, it is not probable that he would be able to confront Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups there. As in the West Bank, new "battalions" and militias will no doubt spring up in the Gaza Strip under Abbas's PA to pursue the Jihad (holy war) to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Islamist state.
The armed wing of the Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) announced on August 26 that five of its members were "martyred while performing their combat duty in the West Bank." One of the gunmen, Yazan Daraghmeh, a commander of the Tubas Battalion militia, was killed in a "work accident": while planting an explosive device that was supposed to be used against Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers in his hometown of Tubas in the northern West Bank. The four other gunmen, Oday Abu Naasa, Ahmed al-Anteer, Taher Raddad, and Mosab al-Muqasqas, were killed in recent clashes with the IDF. They belonged to similar armed groups in the cities of Jenin and Tulkarem, also located in the northern West Bank.
Armed and funded by Iran, the "battalions," whose members are affiliated with PIJ, Hamas and the ruling Fatah faction headed by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, began operating in the northern West Bank more than three years ago.
