Meet the Israelis who fear an October 7th attack from the West Bank.

An IDF general ranks towns near the West Bank as more dangerous than the Gaza border, and residents of the area continue to express urgent concern that they are increasingly vulnerable to terrorism.

Moriah Tzafar pointing to the West Bank from the roof of her building in central Israel (photo: Lahav Harkov)

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This is a guest essay by Lahav Harkov, the Senior Political Correspondent for Jewish Insider, focusing on Israeli politics and diplomacy.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Consider some of the most dangerous places to live in Israel.

There are the kibbutzim and towns along the Gaza border, where Hamas massacred people in their homes on October 7, 2023. There’s the northern border, which was mostly evacuated when the Israel-Hamas war began due to Hezbollah’s attacks from Lebanon.

Perhaps one may think of Hebron, in the West Bank, where Israelis live in a neighborhood in a mostly Palestinian city whose Palestinian mayor participated in a 1980 terror attack that killed six civilians.

Then there’s Bat Hefer, a small town of about 5,000 residents, with kibbutzim to its north and south, a few miles east of Netanya in central Israel.

The sleepy town, nestled between Highway 6, Israel’s major north-south artery, and the 1949 Armistice Line, known as the Green Line, is rated as more dangerous than the Gaza border area, according to Major General Rafi Milo, the head of the IDF’s Home Front Command.

In a recording leaked to one of Israel’s top TV news stations in June, Milo said: “If you ask me where the threat is much greater today, in Bat Hefer the threat is much greater than Yakhini,” a village where Hamas terrorists killed seven people on October 7th.

The danger to Bat Hefer comes from its proximity to Tulkarem, a Palestinian city with a refugee camp from Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. Residents of Tulkarem have shot into Bat Hefer and adjacent towns. The IDF has attempted to stop attacks by razing dozens of homes in the refugee camp in recent months, in what a defense source called “the Gaza-fication of the West Bank.”

While the IDF has a constant and more intense presence in the West Bank than it did in Gaza before October 7th, the threat is still present. Last week, IDF soldiers found rockets in a village next to Tulkarem. For the past two years, many Israelis living near the Green Line — an area also called the seam line — have looked out of their windows at Palestinian villages in the distance and wondered how safe their neighborhoods really are. After October, some began to worry that the same thing could happen to them in central Israel.

Ran Schneider lives in Sha’ar Efraim, a village near Bat Hefer that is an official entry point for goods to pass between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. He did his IDF reserve duty as a member of the village’s rapid response team, and said last year that they had long heard shooting from beyond the fence, but it increased after the October 7th attack.

The community’s rapid-response team “was in uniform protecting the village. Our area of responsibility was inside the village. We would check everyone going in and out and give people a sense of security,” Schneider said.

For many residents of the towns and cities near the Green Line and the separation barrier that runs along it, built in the wake of the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005 to make it harder for terrorists to enter Israel, shootings are only part of the problem. In contrast with some of the more famous segments of the barrier, a high concrete wall often painted with graffiti and murals, much of the barrier is only a metal fence topped with barbed wire. It is a simple fence, lacking some of the high-tech features that the Gaza border fence had before Palestinians bulldozed it on October 7th. In addition, Palestinians for years frequently cut through the fence to work illegally in Israel.

Unlike some central Israeli municipalities, there isn’t a buffer zone between Sha’ar Efraim and the next Palestinian town.

“There isn’t space between us,” Schneider said, lamenting that “there are illegal workers who come in every day [from the Palestinian Authority] and in some cases, they want to commit terrorist attacks. … Even with all the will [of the authorities] to stop this after October 7th, it didn’t happen.”

Even after October 7th, with increased security measures in the West Bank, tens of thousands of Palestinians are estimated to be in Israel illegally each day, and as recently as last summer, one stabbed two Israelis to death and wounded two others in a terror attack in a Tel Aviv suburb. Israeli Police reported to the Knesset that between 2018 and 2022, only 10 percent of Palestinians arrested on security offenses had the necessary permits to be in Israel legally.

In addition to the shootings in and near Bat Hefer, a group of armed Palestinians approached the security barrier last year near the town Matan (another community settlement in central Israel near the Green Line). In August, the IDF sent soldiers to the area’s towns after the Shin Bet warned that Hamas and Iran were in contact with terrorists from Tulkarem and the surrounding area who planned to break through the fence and attack. The IDF eliminated the terrorist cell, according to Israel’s Army Radio.

Mayors and regional council heads from along the Green Line established the Seam Line Municipalities Forum one year ago to address the threats. The forum includes cities such as Kfar Saba and smaller towns and villages, as well as Arab-Israeli towns in the area, such as Kfar Kasem and Taibe.

“The homes of the residents in municipalities that are members of the Seam Line Forum are only hundreds of meters away from the security fence and a short drive from [the Palestinian town of] Kalkilya,” the forum’s chairman, Kfar Saba Mayor Rafi Saar wrote last year. “We cannot be complacent and allow a situation in which the massacre that took place in the Gaza envelope will be repeated in [central Israel]. It is no secret that the tactical paradigm of a separation fence, as advanced as it may be, totally failed on October 7th.”

After writing letters and inviting ministers to tour the area and “recognize the security risk to us and significantly increase the state budget to install security measures,” the forum turned to the High Court of Justice (Israel’s supreme court) last September to force the state to transfer 50 million shekels (approximately $14 million) that the government promised would go to their towns’ security. A ruling is still pending.

In the lawsuit, the mayors cited recent shootings from Palestinian towns into Israel, Palestinians breaking through the security barrier, and flying drones above the Israeli towns, as well as bombs thrown and even two rockets launched into the Southern Sharon Regional Council in central Israel.

Nirit is a small village in central Israel, with fewer than 1,000 residents. The real estate is pricey, and the residents are secular and tend to vote for Center-Left parties. The village abuts the Green Line, and they can see the Palestinian villages Abu Salman and Hableh across a buffer zone. The valley between Nirit and Abu Salman and Hableh is meant to be a closed military zone, but large buildings — not just trailers or aluminum huts — can be seen close to Nirit.

Itzik, a former high-ranking IDF officer who now blows glass in retirement, has lived in the village for most of its 42 years of existence. He looked out to the other side of the closed military zone with concern.

“Twenty years ago, none of the buildings were here. Month after month, more go up. We can see it,” he said, providing photographs and maps that showed the expansion of the Palestinian towns into the buffer zone since 2008.

After October 7th, some residents of Nirit began to think that the Palestinian villages’ encroachment into the buffer zone was putting them at risk. “We worried that if they see the success [of the attack], they will try to replicate it with us,” Itzik said.

After October 7th, the village put up a fence around its perimeter for the first time, and formed a rapid response team. “We would see [Palestinians] penetrate into Israel illegally to look for work,” Itzik said. “One day, someone may pass by our village and think of revenge and end up killing one of the residents. After [2023], it’s not such a strange thought. It could be reality.”

“For many years, the strategy was live and let live,” he said. “We hoped they would live next to us in peace, but as we saw, it’s a fantasy. We wake up in the morning thinking about how to live better lives, and the other side wakes up thinking of ways to destroy us.”

Several kilometers south of Nirit is the city of Rosh Ha’ayin, the hometown of Gal Gadot. It has a population of 56,300, including former Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz and current Transportation Minister Miri Regev. It’s a typical, small city in central Israel, with a train station packed most days with commuters to Tel Aviv, 18 kilometers west. Just under two kilometers east of Rosh Ha’ayin is the Palestinian village Deir Ballut.

Moriah Tzafar, a mother of two and a software developer at a startup, can see Deir Ballut from her apartment building, which she’s lived in for the past four years at the eastern edge of Rosh Ha’ayin. The building is in a new neighborhood called Psagot Afek — Afek is the biblical name for the area — built as part of a government program to provide affordable housing for first-time buyers.

One of her sons attends a public preschool on the outer road of Rosh Ha’ayin, with security cameras posted on its walls trained to look out on the valley beyond the city limits. A few yards past the preschool, there is a path with a warning sign in Hebrew that says “Firing Zone, Entrance Prohibited” — marking the end of sovereign Israel and the start of the West Bank (or Judea and Samaria, its official name in Israel), and then a grassy valley.

That firing zone is one of many that the IDF closed off to civilians decades ago (in this case in 1980) as empty areas designated for military training. The firing zone east of Rosh Ha’ayin is meant to extend all the way out to Deir Ballut, yet, as Tzafar said, “We see suspicious actions in the area between the fence and the Palestinian villages. We see cars driving close to the fence.”

“Not a day goes by that we don’t alert” the government and the IDF about suspicious activity by Palestinians entering the firing zone, Tzafar said, comparing her community to the female IDF lookouts whose warnings were ignored before the October 7th attack. “They’re continuing to do nothing and in the end it’ll reach us.”

Tzafar said she has seen people drive near the fence on the Palestinian side, get out of their cars, and look at Rosh Ha’ayin and take notes.

“What do they have to do along the fence?” Tzafar asked. “They don’t have anywhere to pass through here. There are no shops, no agriculture. Why is a hostile population allowed to enter a closed military zone and approach the fence?”

Ran Gavriel, a member of Rosh Ha’ayin’s rapid-response team, meant to protect the city from terrorist attacks, founded a neighborhood watch team seven years ago. He pointed to a hill south of Rosh Ha’ayin and said:

“There was a hole in the fence there, and we couldn’t see them [Palestinians] because of the hill. They would walk into the valley and then work in this area. They would ride their donkeys to the fence and then leave them because the donkeys know the way back home. And there were terrorist attacks. … My friend was stabbed more than 20 times near his apartment. Six hundred meters from here, a woman was shot.”

Gavriel said he and other members of the neighborhood watch would drive out to the separation barrier to physically block Palestinians from illegally entering Israel and close holes in the fence.

“I used to tell [Palestinians], ‘You are not coming in here,’” he said. “This is exactly like Lebanon and Gaza. [Palestinians] want to build a road into Rosh Ha’ayin. They don’t hide it. The Deir Ballut Facebook page says Rosh Ha’ayin is Palestinian.”

Gavriel said he met with two defense ministers to tell them about the situation, and took Regev on a tour of the vulnerable areas. “The Knesset (Israeli parliament) doesn’t help us,” Gavriel said. “I’m acting because I see no leader here.” The security cameras outside the public preschool are there because the residents paid for them, he noted.

Dany Tirza, a visiting researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, is a former IDF colonel who was in charge of planning the security barrier. He said last December that there was less of a threat from Hamas to the towns along the seam line than there was to Israelis near the Gaza border. “The big difference between what happened in Gaza and the situation in the West Bank is how organized the Palestinians are,” Tirza said. “Hamas in the West Bank is not Hamas in Gaza. They are not organized at that level.”

On a smaller scale, however, Tirza said “it doesn’t take much” for 20 Palestinians to be able to reach a central Israeli town and to attack it because there are so many breaches in the fence. She added that “there is preparation by the army to prevent” an October 7th-like scenario. The IDF “took on this topic as a threat that it needs to take care of. They invested energy, intelligence, technology, and prepared forces so that it doesn’t happen.”

In addition, the seam-line towns are much better organized now, with armed rapid response teams, than they were before October 7th, he pointed out. Still, Tirza said, “Nothing is 100 percent.”

Asked if a wall would be more effective than a fence, Tirza said that the issue is not so much the strength of the barrier itself — because people will always try to find a way to sneak around it — but the IDF’s ability to know about such breaches and respond to them quickly.

“We need a situation where there is not only a fence, but the army gets a warning far enough in advance so that IDF forces can arrive and respond to prevent terrorist activities,” he said. “The same thing has to happen on all of Israel’s borders. We have to build an obstacle to delay [terrorists] and to be able to move fast enough.”

Tirza noted that thousands of Palestinians enter Israel illegally to work each day and not much has been done to stop it, “because we have to let them earn a living.”

“Israel has a much bigger dilemma between allowing a normal life for Israelis and protecting ourselves and living in a fortress with a knife between our teeth,” he said. “We try to find the middle ground. On the one hand, we try to live a normal life without constantly fearing disaster, and on the other hand, we try to prevent all such attacks. It’s a balance.”

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