Terrorism in distress

Arieh O’Sullivan writes in the Jerusalem Post that the IDF is winning the war on terror.

Arrest raids like the one early Wednesday in Jenin that unfortunately killed Staff.-Sgt. Yonatan Evron, combined with targeted assassinations, have come pretty close to quashing Palestinian terror.

On the surface, this statement appears ludicrous in light of last week’s suicide bombing in Hadera and the repeated attempts to fire Kassam rockets out of the Gaza Strip into Israel. But security officials stress that the terror organizations are in distress, and disregard rhetoric about whether they will renew their truce or not.

Each night, security forces fan out across Judea and Samaria and detain suspected fugitives. Nearly 1,000 have been nabbed and brought in for questioning in the past few months. While many were eventually released, the arrest of key terrorists has decimated their ranks, particularly in Hamas, who are now suffering from a dearth of local leaders in the run-up to Palestinian elections.

Yes, I find it difficult to believe as well. But he goes on:

But the crackdown on the terrorist groups in the West Bank has been so vast and consistent that they are resigned to attempting to sneak in from the Gaza Strip not just know-how, but muscle as well.

This was evident in the revelation this week that security forces had nabbed three veteran terrorists attempting to sneak out of the Gaza Strip, through the Sinai and to the West Bank through the Negev.

These three men, members of the Popular Resistance Committees, were not just experts in manufacturing Kassam rockets and explosives, but at organizing active cells and carrying out attacks against Israelis. Their job was to fill the void and set up a military infrastructure in the northern West Bank.

“We are talking of transferring not just brains, but muscle as well,” said a senior security official. “They were to be the bridgehead.”

According to senior security officials, fewer and fewer people are involved in Palestinian terror. Hamas is refraining from openly staging attacks in order to present itself as a political movement in the lead-up to the elections.

The IDF thinking is that, contrary to world opinion, you can defeat terrorists militarily. To that end, they have a network of informants throughout the territories, undercover agents in palestinian towns (I’ll have to search for that link; I wrote about it years ago), and elite forces whose job is to arrest or kill terrorists once their location is known. (I prefer the latter, the catch-and-release program always results in more dead Jews.)

The Israeli strategy regarding terror has always been one of trying to exhaust the public support behind it. Is it working? The jury is out, as far as I’m concerned.