Last update - 02:04 30/12/2007
Blocking the escalation
By Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff
The effort by the security forces to capture those who carried out the shooting attack where two Israel Defense Forces soldiers were killed west of Hebron on Friday is doubly important this time. It hopes to pay back the terrorists and keep them from attacking again, but it is also designed to nip in the bud the creation of a new Jewish terror organization in the West Bank.
An analysis of incidents in the past few decades in which Jews struck at Palestinians shows that right-wing terror groups grew amid Jewish settlers' increasing fears for their safety and progress in the peace talks that would lead to the evacuation of settlements. The latter concern helped form the terror group that operated in the West Bank in the first years of the second intifada. A few members were arrested and tried for attempting to plant bombs in Arab schools, but the Shin Bet security service also blames this organization for murdering seven Palestinians in gun attacks on West Bank roads.
Friday's attack was the second in slightly over a month whose victims were young people from older, ideological, settlements in the West Bank. In November, Ido Zoldan of Kedumim was murdered. The two soldiers who were killed near Hebron on Friday were from Kiryat Arba and belonged to families with a deep connection to the settlement enterprise.
An increased sense of threat among the settlers could lead to acts of revenge, from public disturbances and damage to Arab property to the use of arms, in the most extreme case. Zoldan's murder was followed by rioting in Funduk, the village where the attack took place, but not by revenge attacks. One reason is that the murder followed a long period of relative calm. Another is the rapid capture of the terrorists.
Witnesses to a number of shooting attacks in the area say they saw a Subaru with its trunk open at the site. IDF commander Col. Eran Niv of the Ephraim (Qalqilyah) area, believing that Zoldan's killers came from the nearby Palestinian village of Qadum, carried out searches in Qadum the night after Zoldan's murder and found the car. The murderers were in Shin Bet hands by the following day.
The fact the two soldiers managed to kill one of their attackers and wound another gives the IDF an advantage: As soon as the identities of two members of the cell are known, the remainder will probably not take long to find.
Israeli hikers do not frequent the Telem stream, where Friday's attack took place, so it is unlikely that terrorists ambushed the three Israelis. (A woman hiking with the soldiers escaped uninjured.) The stream is also relatively far from the nearest Palestinian village, so it is unlikely that the terrorists were alerted by other Palestinians to the presence of the Israelis. Members of the Palestinian preventive security forces suggested yesterday that the Israelis might have accidentally interrupted a meeting of arms dealers, who subsequently decided to shoot them.