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| DATE | 2023-10-27 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] broadned war with the Palestinians on the West
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Weapons Flood West Bank, Fueling Fears of New War Front With Israel
Sune Engel Rasmussen and Benoit Faucon
10–13 minutes
Oct. 25, 2023 12:01 am ET
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AMMAN, Jordan—Long before Hamas militants burst out of their Gaza
stronghold to massacre scores of civilians with handguns and assault
rifles, Iran and its allies had accelerated efforts to smuggle weapons
into a different part of the Palestinian territories, the West Bank.
Using drones, secret airline flights and a land bridge that traverses
hundreds of miles and at least four national borders, the smuggling
operation is raising the specter of a new conflagration in the war
between Israel and Palestinians. It also poses a growing threat to
Jordan, a staunch U.S. ally which borders Israel and the West Bank and
has been struggling to contain a growing flow of drugs and arms.
“Iran wants to turn Jordan into a transit area for weapons going into
Israel,” said Amer Al-Sabaileh, founder of Security Languages, a
counterterrorism think tank in Amman. “But my fear is that the weapons
might be used in Jordan as well. Where is the easiest place in the
Middle East to punish the U.S. and the West? Jordan,” he said.
Iran is a patron of Hamas, which it over the years has supplied with
money, weapons and training. But as Egypt has cracked down on smuggling
routes through the Sinai Peninsula, which borders on the Gaza Strip,
Hamas has become increasingly self-reliant on indigenously built
weapons, especially rockets.
The bulk of Iranian weapons to Palestinians go into the West Bank,
particularly to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a militant group allied
with Hamas, according to a senior Jordanian security official. Both have
been designated terrorist organizations by the U.S., Europe and Israel.
The official said networks of smugglers, assisted by the Syrian
government and Iranian-backed militias like Hezbollah, were growing.
“The weapons flow has really increased, specifically over the past year.
This is because Iran has been much more focused on the West Bank
recently, and trying to arm some of the groups there, especially the
Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is Iran’s more direct partner,” said
Michael Horowitz, Israel-based head of intelligence at Le Beck
International, a risk consulting firm.
“This probably explains part of the intelligence failure [during the
Hamas attack], because Israel was more focused on the West Bank than
Gaza,” Horowitz said.
For more than a decade, Iran has taken advantage of upheaval and
corrosion of government authority in the Middle East to cement its
footprint in the region. Through a network of loyal militias, Tehran has
established a land corridor across Iraq and Syria into Lebanon and, via
Jordan, into the West Bank, allowing it to transport troops, equipment
and weapons to its allies in the Levant.
Jordan, which has porous borders to war-torn Syria, controlled by Iran’s
ally Bashar al-Assad, as well as to the West Bank, has long been vexed
by the trafficking of weapons and drugs through its territory.
Jordanian officials have complained to Syria, and expressed their
concerns to European allies, worried that weapons flows into the West
Bank would strain its relations with Israel, according to European and
Middle Eastern officials.
Weapons smuggled into Jordan include Iranian replicas of U.S.-made
Claymore antipersonnel mines, M4-style assault rifles, TNT and other
explosives and handguns, according to the senior Jordanian official.
Terrorgence, an information network that includes advisers to Israeli
police, said in October that Israeli border forces had confiscated
antipersonnel mines manufactured in Iran and Russia.
Going across the Syrian border into Jordan, the arms are hidden in
trucks going through official border crossings or carried across the
vast desert expanses, which in the winter are shrouded in fog and dust.
Drones, a new tool of warfare for nonstate actors, are also handy for
smuggling. In February, Jordanian agents caught the first unmanned
aerial vehicle from Syria carrying hand grenades—four of them. A
commercial drone, bought cheap online and fairly easy to maneuver, can
also carry two assault rifles, and is very difficult to detect, another
Jordanian security official responsible for monitoring the Syrian border
said.
“We only see drones by chance,” he said.
Iran has used other means to transport weapons. In February, after a
devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria, Esmail Qaani, commander of
Iran’s elite Quds Force, which is responsible for the Revolutionary
Guard’s foreign operations, visited the Syrian city of Aleppo,
ostensibly to supervise aid deliveries. Qaani flew to Syria in an
aircraft owned by Mahan, an airline that has been sanctioned by the U.S.
for flying militants and weapons from Iran to Syria.
Soon after Qaani’s visit, the airline, under the guise of delivering
aid, began hauling large quantities of weapons to Syria, according to a
Central Intelligence Agency operative in the region, a Syrian government
adviser and a European security official.
It is unclear how many weapons are smuggled into the Palestinian
territories, and whether some of the weapons end up in Gaza, via Israeli
proper, though the vast majority going through Jordan appears destined
for the West Bank, regional security officials say.
The Israeli army last year said there had been a “significant rise” in
detected attempts to smuggle weapons and drugs into Israel from Jordan
and Egypt. From March 2021 to April this year, Israeli police thwarted
at least 35 smuggling attempts from Jordan, seizing more than 800
weapons, according to a tally by the Washington Institute think tank.
“The Iranians are investing lots of efforts in inflaming all arenas, in
the north and the West Bank alike,” a spokesperson for the Israel
Defense Forces said. “The IDF is reinforcing the troops and ready for
every possibility.”
Traffickers in Jordan profit from the country’s large black market in
arms, where guns trade for about one-fourth of the price in the
Palestinian territories, according to licensed arms dealers in the
capital, Amman. An AK-47 sells for as much as $20,000 in the West Bank,
and an M16 rifle for $30,000, according to an arms dealer in the West
Bank.
“The country is awash with weapons,” said a gun shop owner in downtown
Amman. Prices on the black market are roughly the same as his: from $700
for a Czech 7mm to $4,200 for an Austrian Glock.
In May, a Jordanian lawmaker, Imad al-Adwan, was detained trying to
smuggle more than 200 firearms, including 12 assault rifles, across the
Allenby Bridge into the West Bank. Israel extradited Adwan to Jordan
where he faces trial and up to 15 years in prison. He and 13 other
defendants are expected to respond to the charges in court this week.
Palestinian groups have built sizable caches of weapons. In July,
Israeli forces carried out their largest assault on the West Bank in
decades, targeting militant facilities and weapons depots in Jenin that
belonged to the Iran-allied Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, seizing
about 1,000 weapons and hundreds of explosive devices. They also
dismantled six bomb-making facilities. Twelve Palestinians were killed,
most of them militants, 30 suspects were arrested and hundreds of people
were displaced.
Portions of the West Bank are policed by the Palestinian Authority,
which is dominated by Fatah, a faction opposed to Hamas and the
Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In the past two years, Palestinian police
have seized about 600 to 1,000 weapons annually in the West Bank, more
than twice the number before 2021, police spokesman Louay Zreikat said,
adding that about 60% of those weapons were used for self-protection or
criminal activities.
Following Hamas’ attack earlier this month, Israeli security forces have
intensified a two-year crackdown on Palestinians in the West Bank, and
settlers have attacked protesters and civilians. On Friday, 13
Palestinians were killed in a 30-hour long Israeli military operation
against militants in refugee camps in Tulkarem. That came after 55
people were killed in the first week after Oct. 7, the deadliest week
for West Bank Palestinians since at least 2005, according to the United
Nations.
Anger over the crackdown and the Gaza bombings, paired with an
increasingly heavily armed West Bank, poses a problem for the governing
Palestinian Authority, whose grip on security has slipped as new
militant groups have jockeyed for power, and residents resort to
violence rather than turn to law enforcement to resolve internal
disputes.
An arms dealer in Al-Ram in the West Bank said he sells hundreds of
weapons every month, mostly to people who are organizing to defend their
villages in the absence of coordinated Palestinian security.
“There’s a big demand nowadays,” he said, “but I tell you all of them
are very young.”
The absence of a viable candidate to replace 87-year-old Mahmoud Abbas,
whose popularity has long been waning, adds to volatility in the
territory as loyalists of competing prospective candidates acquire arms
and jostle for power.
The Palestinian Authority didn’t reply to a request for comment.
Horowitz said an ignition of the West Bank could lead to a “cycle of
violence,” with the Israeli army deploying more forces, and settlers
carrying out more revenge attacks against Palestinians.
For Jordan, stemming the flow of weapons is a Herculean task. The
Kingdom is to some extent a victim of its geography. Its long northern
border is largely unguarded on the Syrian side, due to lack of
cooperation from the Assad government, and its frontier with Israel
isn’t protected by significant fencing, making it a viable route for
large-scale smuggling.
Jordan this year has made nine weapons seizures on the border, compared
to seven in 2022 and 21 in 2021, according to the senior security
official.
Years ago, at the peak of Islamic State’s reign, many weapons smuggled
into Jordan were destined for Sunni terrorist groups, but now they are
mostly traded for commercial gain, said Mohammad Afeef, a former
president of Jordan’s State Security Court.
He warned that if security continued to deteriorate, the high
concentration of weapons could in time benefit terrorist sleeper cells.
That should worry the West, he said.
“Jordan is playing a pivotal role in preventing smuggling of narcotics
and weapons,” Afeef said. “It is a huge burden for us.”
Suha Ma’ayeh and Fatima AbdulKarim contributed to this article.
Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at sune.rasmussen-at-wsj.com and Benoit
Faucon at benoit.faucon-at-wsj.com
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