Israel's iron fist against the terrorist offensive

Three attacks in a week have forced Israel's Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to declare a general alert and put all his forces in "counter-terrorism mode". Bennett called an evening meeting of all state security officials and ordered them to "fight the wave of Arab terrorism with an iron fist".

The first in this series of attacks took place on 22 March in the town of Beersheva, near Gaza and the headquarters of the army's Southern Command. Four Israeli citizens, two men and two women, were stabbed to death and run over by a kamikaze vehicle whose perpetrator was allegedly inspired by ISIS ideology. The assailant, who was himself shot by the police, had been a teacher before being sentenced to four years in prison for attempting to flee to Syria and join Daesh.

The second occurred last Sunday in Hadera, in northern Israel, where two policemen were shot by terrorists who claimed to belong to Daesh, proclamations that were immediately qualified and supported by the Palestinian Islamic movements, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who did not hesitate to describe the terrorists' actions as "heroic".

On Tuesday it was the turn of the village of Bnei Brak, in the suburbs of Tel Aviv, inhabited almost exclusively by ultra-orthodox Jews, and Ramat Gan, also in the suburbs of Israel's populous economic capital. The attacks were carried out by a single assailant, who killed four passers-by and an Arab Israeli police officer with his machine gun before being shot dead by anti-terrorist forces. Identified as Dia Hamarshah, the Palestinian was from Yaabad in the occupied West Bank and reportedly spent four years in Israeli prisons for his active involvement in distributing propaganda and preparing attacks.

From the first analysis of this bloody series, the first thing to emerge is that this is a prelude to a presumably larger offensive coinciding with Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, which begins next week. This activation of action on the ground follows an increase in verbal threats from Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, all of which are armed, funded and supported by Iran. Israeli security has increasingly detected radicalised Israeli Arabs on its own territory, while dismantling numerous underground tunnels between Israel and the border territories with Lebanon, Gaza and Syria, through which members of these groups would infiltrate with weapons and explosives intended for attacks in Israel.

This spiral of terrorist violence is also a response to Israel's recent political and diplomatic actions, which last Sunday brought together in the Negev desert a historic summit of foreign ministers from the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, joined by the US Secretary of State. The meeting seemed to mark a paradigm shift, as the participants were unanimous on the issue of combating terrorism, but at the same time they were all aligned against the United States on the renewal of the nuclear deal with Iran.

Bennett's government also sees Ramadan as a time for an upsurge in attacks and terrorist attacks, a spiral that it is also trying to counteract on the diplomatic front. Thus, Defence Minister Benny Gantz met with King Abdullah II of Jordan, who also met with President Isaac Herzog. Similarly, the Portuguese Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, called for an end to "these acts of violence, which must be condemned by all". A recommendation immediately followed by the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Mahmoud Abbas, who, given the gravity of the events, affirmed that "the killing of Palestinian and Israeli civilians only aggravates the situation as we strive to seek stability".

In his statement, distributed by the Palestinian news agency Wafa, Abou Mazen makes a clear call for the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations: "This violence confirms that a permanent, comprehensive and just peace is the shortest way to ensure the security and stability of the Palestinian and Israeli peoples". The PA president is also besieged by increasingly frequent attacks on him by Hamas, which continues a tenacious smear campaign against the Palestinian leadership based in Ramallah and already controls the entire Gaza Strip.