With an increase in incidents involving the Israeli-Jordanian border, Prof. Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and Misgav Institute, spoke with JNS about the source of the escalation and challenges that Jerusalem faces in countering it.
“Smuggling on that border always existed,” said Michael, who specializes in civil-military relations, national and internal security and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “And it involved terrorist elements of arms smuggling, including shootings, but the scope was much smaller. The Jordanians are trying to curb the phenomenon, but just as Israel face challenges in doing so, so does the Hashemite Kingdom.”
Recent events pointing in that direction include:
- A Jordanian citizen opened fire at the Allenby Bridge crossing in the Jordan Valley on Sunday, killing three Israelis, in what was the latest in a series of terror attacks in the region in recent weeks. Yohanan Shchori, 61, Yuri Birnbaum, 65, and Adrian Marcelo Podsmeser, 57, were killed in the attack. The terrorist was eliminated at the scene.
- On Aug. 18, a suicide bomber from the area of Nablus died in a failed explosion in the heart of Tel Aviv, moderately injuring a passerby riding an electric scooter. The bomber carried a powerful explosive device in his backpack, which, Hebrew media reported, exploded before the assailant had reached his destination.
- On Aug. 11, a Hamas squad from Jenin in northern Samaria killed Yonatan Deutsch, 23, and injured another Israeli in a shooting attack in the Jordan Valley.
- A few days earlier, the Israel Defense Forces shot and killed an armed terrorist near the town of Beka’ot, also in the Jordan Valley, who was on his way to carry out an attack. A military inquiry had found that the attack was meant to draw security forces to nearby explosives.
Iranian fingerprints
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz told Kan News in late August: “Iran is working to establish an eastern terrorist front in Judea and Samaria, just like the Gaza and Lebanon model, by financing and arming terrorists and smuggling advanced weapons from Jordan. We must deal with the threat just as we deal with the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, including the temporary evacuation of [Palestinian] residents and whatever would-be necessary steps.”
Michael concurred. “In the wake of Israel’s significant achievements in the Gaza Strip, Tehran realized that it lost Hamas in Israel’s south,” he told JNS. “Since the Islamic Republic has not abandoned its ‘ring of fire’ and attritional war strategy against Israel, it’s seeking to compensate for its asset loss in Gaza [by establishing a new one] in Judea and Samaria.”
He added, “Judea and Samaria are potentially even more of a tinderbox than the Gaza Strip, because half a million Jews live there, and it commands over many metropolitan areas in Israel, such as Netanya and Kfar Saba; whereas most Israeli territory adjacent to the Palestinian enclave in the south is farm lands.”
Inundating Judea and Samaria with arms
The border with Jordan is Israel’s longest land border and contains many breaching points.
The Israeli fence separating the two is incomplete, with mountainous topography and tangled flora making supervision especially difficult. Israel also lacks sufficient manpower to guard the lengthy area.
Michael said that Iran, which has free reign in Lebanon and Syria, finds little difficulty in smuggling arms through the practically open border between Syria and Jordan, and from there into Israel and Judea and Samaria.
He went on to say that the Jordanian side is rife with smuggling networks that deal with drugs, illegal immigration, human trafficking, arms and the transfer of advanced military knowledge.
“Traditionally, networks of illicit drug trade have also been utilized for terrorist activities,” Michael said. “Iran has in effect an entire system with direct access into Judea and Samaria. It is flooding the region with weapons and advanced explosives, as well as boatloads of cash, which aids terrorist organizations to recruit new members, and is forcing Israel’s hand into taking military action. This is the same modus operandi that we witnessed in Gaza—only [in Judea and Samaria] it is still in its first stages and is therefore less organized.”
In the wake of the failed suicide bombing in Tel Aviv last month, the IDF launched a large-scale counterterrorism operation in the Jenin and Tulkarem areas of northern Samaria, involving at least two brigades, as well as air support.
“The IDF took off its gloves,” moving beyond its surgical operations in Judea and Samaria, Michael said. “It is operating in high intensity in the entire region and the results are decisive: dozens of terrorists killed, serious damages to terrorist infrastructure—and this will only intensify.”
Michael said that Israel is well aware of the problem along the Jordanian border and believes that it will address it with the construction of physical barriers, additional security forces and heightened intelligence to foil the smuggling.
“You can’t stop all smuggling 100%. But you can work systematically to reduce it to the point that terrorist capabilities in Judea and Samaria will be significantly dried out, while engaging in determined and aggressive military action,” he stated.
The Egyptian border
Yonatan Jakubowicz, founder of the Israeli Immigration Policy Center and former special adviser in Israel’s Interior Ministry, told JNS last week that Israel in the past faced a similar problem with the Egyptian border.
“The stream of infiltration [of African migrants] through the Egyptian border stopped in 2012, and was largely attributed to the completion of the border fence. However, we know that it wasn’t the fence that stopped it. The numbers had already declined from almost 2,000 a month to hundreds, then a few dozen to zero, several months before the fence was completed,” Jakubowicz noted.
“A fence can help—placing obstacles on border intrusions—but it can’t really stop entry. We know of hundreds of migrants climbing over the fence with Egypt over the past decade, and we’ve seen similar cases [of infiltration] from Jordan and Judea and Samaria with Palestinians entering Israel [illegally]. If 60,000 Palestinian workers can enter Israel on a daily basis, so can one suicide bomber,” he stipulated.
The former adviser stressed that the chief factor that halted the steady stream of migrants from Egypt was the parliamentary amendment of the Prevention of Infiltration Law, passed on Jan. 9, 2012.
“The law specified that any infiltrator could be held in a detention center for up to three years, which immediately impacted the incentives to continue the infiltrations,” Jakubowicz said. “However, the Supreme Court of Israel struck down three Knesset rulings regarding the detention centers, including a law mandating employers to impose a 20% deduction on the wages of undocumented workers [to be returned after leaving the country]. And it struck down another law concerning deportation to a third country.”
This meant, he said, “that Israel became an attractive destination once again for the populations that entered from the Egyptian border, mostly Sudanese, Eritrean and Ethiopian, who found Jordan an easier entry route into Israel.”
Exponential influx of migrants
Jakubowicz pointed out that infiltration from Jordan began in 2021, with dozens entering per month. Today, though he could not provide precise figures, he cited military sources that talked about 4,000 undocumented entries since the start of the year.
“This exponential increase from Jordan is exactly what we experienced in Egypt,” he said. “There are now several entry points in the Arava region [south to the Dead Sea], in the Jordan Valley and near Kibbutz Ashdot Ya’akov, south of the Sea of Galilee.”
Jordan is a comfortable intermediary for migrants because, unlike the Egyptian border that requires journeying through the Sinai desert, Israel’s eastern border is situated along many population centers, Jakubowicz added.
“Amman is an hour away in a cab,” he remarked.
Jakubowicz went on to say that there is a close correlation between the increase of illegal immigration from Jordan and the increase of arms smuggling into Judea and Samaria, which finds its way into the hands of terrorist organizations, as well as organized crime rings inside Israel.
“If you know how to smuggle Sri Lankan workers without getting caught, you will also know how to smuggle weapons,” he noted, stipulating that the more Israel waits in dealing with the influx of illegal migrants, the more drastic the measures that will be required to stop it.
“Immigration is all about incentives. [Negative] incentives will impact the situation a lot faster and more efficiently than many people realize. That is why the government should act swiftly and act now,” he concluded.
Jordan is key for regional stability
Discussing Iran’s meddling in Jordan, Michael asserted that Tehran’s end game is to attain Iranian-Shi’ite hegemony in the Middle East.
“Iran’s wet dream is to take over Jordan. The Iranians have been actively trying to topple the Hashemites [Jordan’s royal family] for many years. It would give them, along with Syria and Iraq, a full circle around Israel,” he said.
Michael stressed that the Iranians have a twofold purpose in the smuggling networks in Jordan: arming the Palestinians and weakening the Hashemite Kingdom. He called the Jordan issue a “blind spot” that the Americans are not paying full attention to.
“The push to end the war in Gaza at all costs, without taking into account the full context of the Middle East [problems], and paying lip service to the ‘revitalized Palestinian Authority’—which will indeed become a revitalized Palestinian Authority—will only lead to more instability in the region and more serious threats,” he said.
The Philadelphi Corridor, the narrow strip of land between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, which is now controlled by the IDF, is a matter of principle, Michael stressed.
Philadelphi has become a controversial issue with regard to its significance in a possible hostage agreement with Hamas, with international and domestic voices pressuring the Israeli government to concede the corridor to the terrorist organization in return for the remaining 101 Israeli hostages.
“If Israel were compelled to withdraw from Philadelphi, this could set a dangerous precedent to withdraw from the Jordan Valley at some point in the future. There is a risk of a slippery slope of systematic pressures against Israel, which will deprive it of its ability to defend itself in other security perimeters in the Gaza Strip, as well as in places like Judea and Samaria in the future,” he said. “The same logic that is true for the Jordan border is also true for the Philadelphi Corridor.”
