The West Bank emerges as Israel’s biggest counterterrorism success since October 7 - opinion

Israel’s geostrategic successes since the October 7 massacre are beyond debate.

The defiant yellow-flag-draped tent Hezbollah set up on Israeli territory has been replaced by IDF strongholds in Lebanese territory that a cowed Hezbollah is compelled to accept.

Iran, Israel’s major foe, not only suffered the brunt of two campaigns, the first Israeli-made, the second jointly with the US, but, equally if not more importantly, lost its crown jewel, the Assad regime in Syria, in its grand strategy to lay permanent siege to Israel through a ring of missile-firing proxies.

Arab commentators are almost unanimous in attributing this outcome to the blows Israel dealt to Hezbollah, the Assad regime’s major defender against the jihadists in northern Syria whom the Turks supported.

In Gaza, one has only to recall where Israel stood not only on the morrow of October 7, but even after the killing of Border Police marksman Barel Hadaria Shmueli, at point-blank range on the Gaza fence in 2020. The assailant, Muhammad Maher Abu Jisr, fled unscathed, took part in the massacre, and was only killed in 2024.

In utter contrast, the IDF, which controls 60% of Gaza, has killed, over the past half year, hundreds of terrorists, including two Hamas chief-of-staff commanders, and abducted two key Hamas terrorists in broad daylight (achievements not witnessed since Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005), to which Hamas is too weak to respond.

Politically, contrary to the assessment of many, Hamas leaders publicly clamor for the Palestinian administrative agency, presently in Cairo, to enter Gaza, despite being part of a peace plan promoted by US President Donald Trump, a foe of the organization, and manned mostly by technocrats linked to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, their major domestic enemy.

Israel sees sharp decline in terror attack casualties

However impressive these achievements are, they pale in comparison to what has occurred in Judea and Samaria, where the level of terrorism in the past year has declined to a level not seen since before the First Intifada in 1987.

Six Israelis have been killed so far this year, compared to 46 and 43 Israelis killed in 2024 and 2023, respectively. The number of wounded from terrorist attacks dropped by 42% from 2024 to 2025 alone.

The reasons for this sharp decline are easily identifiable.

The most important by far is a radical change in counterterrorism strategy that began in 2024 – a change from daily and mostly nightly incursions, since 2002, into all areas of the PA to make preventive arrests to prevent these areas from becoming a sanctuary zone, as they became in the first eight years of the PA, to a strategy of permanently occupying the large refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nablus, where the terrorists were concentrated and organized in local, rudimentary, battalion-level units.

In the course of occupying these camps and the relocation of many of its inhabitants, these units were systematically destroyed, almost to the last man.

Israel’s iron-fist policies, including shooting at rock-throwers, increased the costs to would-be terrorists, an important second factor in reducing terrorism.

Incidentally, reducing Palestinian terrorism also means a reduction of Palestinian casualties.

Finally, Hamas spokesmen have also acknowledged that harsher conditions imposed in Israeli prisons in the past three years have had a dampening effect on Hamas recruitment.

Developments in Judea and Samaria have also been mirrored in Jerusalem, with its large Arab population.

Political violence in Jerusalem has always been exaggerated by the Qatar-led and Qatar-financed media. In fact, political violence in Jerusalem over the past 30 years averages out to below the crime levels of the average city in the United States and many European cities.

What gives the impression of an incendiary city are the very short spikes of political violence, the last of which was in 2021. Since then, the level of violence (political and criminal) in Jerusalem places it on par with Oslo, at fewer than two homicides per 100,000. In 2026, only one Israeli citizen was slightly wounded in a terrorist event in the city.

Strategic and tactical success in Judea and Samaria and elsewhere has not come at the cost of maintaining the peace accords. None of the countries that have signed peace or normalization agreements with Israel – Egypt, the UAE, Jordan, Morocco, and Bahrain – have abrogated their treaties with Israel, and channels to Arab states, most notably, Saudi Arabia, have remained open.

Where Israel has certainly suffered – in world opinion, and worrisomely so in the United States – has to do with the presumed genocide Israel allegedly carried out in Gaza, from which it totally withdrew in 2005 after dismantling all Israeli settlements.

Ironically, where Israel made the most concessions and suffered a massacre to boot, it has drawn the most opprobrium.

Front after front, but most noticeably in Judea and Samaria, proves the sagacity of the tough offensive action against Israel’s enemies – the incumbent government’s basic template since the October 7 massacre.

This is hardly a lesson recently learned. It was a series of wars that compelled Egypt to make peace with Israel – by far Israel’s greatest achievement in the region – and only the judicious use of force will achieve peace in the future.

The writer is a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security and professor emeritus at Bar-Ilan University.