Community leaders want Israel to use ‘Gaza model’ to purge Judea and Samaria of terror

This front against Israel is a danger that must be recognized and forceful action must be taken, they wrote to the security cabinet.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Judea and Samaria leaders demanded Sunday that the IDF use the ‘Gaza model’ to empty their region of terrorists in light of the danger that this front could easily erupt at any time and cause loss of life that was preventable.

In a letter to the security cabinet, the heads of the settlement umbrella group the Yesha Council and local regional councils said that terror hotspots in the Palestinian Authority should be cleared out en masse of their residents, much as the Israeli army has done in northern Gaza.

“The population living in zones identified with terrorism, with a focus on ‘refugee’ camps and known terror complexes, should be moved,” they wrote. “After moving the population, the terrorism infrastructure should be dismantled exactly as we have done in the Gaza Strip, meaning: any incriminated building to be destroyed, every terrorist to be taken out.”

Only such actions would enable Israel to deal with the various Palestinian terrorist groups in a way that will “exert effective pressure and extract a significant price.”

The threat to their population was real, they said, because Iranian efforts to roil the territory was bearing fruit and deadly terror attacks and attempted attacks were on the rise.

Just last month, the Shabak (Shin Bet internal security agency) and the IDF seized a large shipment of Iranian weapons that had been smuggled into the region, which included rockets, remote-control bombs, mortar and RPG launchers, firearms and ammunition.

Yesha Council Chairman Yisrael Gantz pointed out that there was no way of knowing how many shipments the security authorities had missed, and that the danger was not limited to Judea and Samaria.

“Even a single missile that may have been successfully smuggled into the country, which we are unaware of and is hidden in someone’s home, is enough to put every plane landing at Ben Gurion Airport at risk,” he noted.

The leaders also asked in their letter that Palestinian movement should be restricted on the region’s roads, which had been the focus of thousands of shooting, ramming and rock throwing attacks a year even before October 7.

The letter said that the precarious security situation in the region was “the result of policies initiated under the Oslo Accords,” and said that “is within your power to change this, and it is your duty to do so.”