Jordan Valley Residents on Edge as Terror and Smuggling Threats Grow

Jerusalem, 21 August, 2024 (TPS) -- A sense of nervousness pervades Israel’s Jordan Valley.

In recent days, a Palestinian drive-by shooting killed an Israeli man and injured another. On Tuesday, several Palestinian terrorists planting a bomb in the nearby village of Tammun were injured when a bomb they were planting exploded prematurely.

And on Wednesday, Israel assassinated a Palestinian terrorist who, working on behalf of Iran, directed weapons smuggling from Jordan. The smuggling is a significant reason for a surge in illegal Palestinian weapons — and it passes through their area.

“The situation is awful,” one valley resident told The Press Service of Israel. The resident, who will be identified as L. works in the military and did not want to be identified discussing a sensitive issue.

“Terror has been spreading to the valley and making its base here. Small Palestinian villages surrounding the Jewish communities now each have a Hamas squad in it. And this is only one of the dangers. From the east, the situation is as bad, or maybe worse. The border with Jordan is very penetrable, tons of arms are flooding the valley from there. And we hear news of Iranian militias concentrating on the borders. With 70 percent of Jordanians being Palestinians, and the border so easy to break, you can imagine how frightening the situation is,” L. told TPS-IL.

While the Israel-Jordan border is 482 km long, the Jordan Valley is the main smuggling corridor due to its proximity to Syria and Lebanon.

‘October 7 Put an End to the Idyll’

The Jordan Valley has been very different from the rest of Judea and Samaria up until recently.

“There was an idyll here, real coexistence between the Jews and the Palestinians,” says Daniel Rosenfeld, a resident of Moshav Shadmot Mehola in the northern part of the valley. “Residents of Tubas and Tamin, which have become Hamas’s strongholds, would come to my place to have coffee. The man who built my house was from Tubas. In September last year, I asked him to paint my house, and this was the last time we talked. October 7 put an end to the idyll.”

Tension is in the air. In the date plantations across the agricultural valley, hundreds of Palestinians still work. Unlike in the rest of Israel, they don’t even need to pass any checkpoint to reach work.

“This is the catch,” Ben Bason, a resident of Moshav Petza’el explains. “The more we employ the Palestinians, the bigger their villages grow and the closer they get to the Jewish communities. The way out of this catch is to bring more foreign workers. But the government does not encourage this. They think if we let the Palestinians earn more, they will be less eager to engage in terror.”

Some communities do not agree to bring in Palestinians at all. “Anyone who [carries out] a terror attack here has no problem escaping easily to one of the villages, and people know it,” Bason notes. “They are closing themselves inside the settlements. Those who live in the houses closer to the gate have begun to close the shutters for the night. Before October 7, children would go by themselves to a spring or elsewhere outside a community, but now it’s over.”

An Israeli girl plays at the Einot Kedem farm in the Jordan Valley. Photo by TPS

The army presence in the region has become more significant in the last few months, with a third battalion being added to the two already stationed in the valley. However, this may not be enough.

“This third battalion is a temporary one and is made up of soldiers who were patrolling the Egyptian or the Lebanese border before. They are not qualified to deal with the threats present in the Jordan Valley, where there is a large Palestinian population,” L. told TPS-IL.

Hadas Gozman, head of security for the Jordan Valley Regional Council, said residents have lost their sense of security.

“When people get on the road now, they are happy to see soldiers,” she told TPS-IL.

“We are thinking of creating an emergency squad made up of the locals, that could arrive quickly to a scene of a terror attack. Unlike kitot konenut (Hebrew for local civilian security teams), this squad will not protect a specific community, but will operate in the entire valley.”

While residents welcomed a recent announcement that the army intends to create a new Jordan Valley division, this remains in the planning stage.

“It takes a lot of resources to create a division for it to be effective. It won’t happen overnight,” an IDF official speaking on background told TPS-IL.

There are also plans to fence off the border, though the idea has been floated on other occasions.

“There is a plan to do it, and it is now on review in the Ministry of Defence. The cost of it is billions of dollars, and it will take years to build. We have put more surveillance and more force in the places on the border where we know a break can happen because there were attempts there before. But be it that an attack similar to that of October 7 were to happen here, it may have a chance. We know it, and we train all the forces situated in the valley with this in mind,” the military official said.

But residents remain unsettled. Said L., “The Jordan valley is becoming an Achilles heel of Israel. I would prefer the army told us these are the threats and this is how we deal with them, instead of keeping silent and letting people dive into hysteria.”