Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Wednesday said that the IDF’s achieved successes in Jenin, but may need to carry out one to two additional operations there to fully tame the terror situation.
Gallant said that the IDF’s biggest victory was destroying and removing the terror infrastructure and huge quantities of weapons.
He said the next biggest win was sending the Jenin terrorists into retreat and hiding, which negates their narrative of being brave fighters who could truly challenge the IDF.
At the same time, he recognized that since half or more of the 300 terror fighters in Jenin hid or fled, that additional operations may be necessary to deal with them.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s influence in Jenin
The defense minister emphasized that Islamic Jihad’s influence in Jenin was outsized as compared to most of the West Bank.
People walk on a street as Israeli troops start withdrawing from Jenin, in the West Bank, July 4, 2023. (credit: RANEEN SAWAFTA/REUTERS)Since Islamic Jihad gets all of its funding from Iran, he said that this meant that the Islamic Republic’s hand in Jenin was also larger than in other places.
Going forward, Gallant took an aggressive view about using airpower saying that for nearly two decades he had advocated using airstrikes in the West Bank whenever necessary to target terrorists escaping from an area they attacked or to assist IDF soldiers who might be pinned down in a fight with Palestinians.
The capabilities of the IDF
He said that the IDF’s drone capabilities were very precise and had led to essentially no civilian casualties in Jenin despite more than 20 airstrikes.
IDF sources said that despite the massive IDF attack on the Jenin refugee camp and other select violent areas, that most of Jenin was not damaged by the two day battle.
Further, sources said that Israeli security forces permitted very large numbers of Jenin residents to continue to work in Israel, along with most of the around 210,000 West Bank Palestinians who regularly work in Israel.
This was to make the point to the Palestinians that most of the West Bank could maintain their routine and even much of Jenin could return to normal quickly, with little damage to their properties, provided they were not involved in terror.
Sources indicated that in much of the West Bank, increasing worker permits was a winning strategy, but because of unique ideological and cultural aspects to Jenin, simply increasing worker permits might not be enough there to end support for terror.
Part of the issue returns to the large number of residents associated with Islamic Jihad and funded by Iran.
Both Gallant and IDF sources expressed hope that the Palestinian Authority would take better charge of Jenin and calm the situation.
However, both the defense minister and military sources also did not expect the PA to succeed and di not have clear answers about what would reduce Palestinians’ motivations for terror in Jenin over the long-term.
The IDF’s two day massive operation in Jenin came after a spike in terror from the West Bank, with over 50 attacks emanating from Jenin in the last several months, as well as 19 terrorists seeking refuge in Jenin.
The waves of terror in the West Bank date back to March 2022, but after 15 months of smaller nightly raids and arrests, the IDF and the government decided a much larger stick was needed to try to reduce the terror waves.
Although Hamas and Hezbollah both threatened to join the conflict, only five rockets were fired from Gaza with no real impact and Hezbollah stayed out of the conflict entirely.
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