IDF officer — we failed to nab terror cell before deadly attack

A senior officer in the IDF’s OC Central Command says the wave of terror attacks is not likely to end soon.

“I see a wave of escalation, and there are comments calling to calm the situation coming from the Palestinian side, but I cannot say we are close to the end of this,” the officer says during a situation assessment held in the Samaria Brigade.

Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon were both present at the briefing.

The officer says the latest incidents mark a wave of terror attacks but not a full-scale intifada (popular uprising). “We are still not at a period where it all explodes but during what seems more like waves of terror attacks. There are many ways in which we try to influence this to remain no more than a wave of terrorism and it is not a hundred percent over just yet,” the unnamed officer is quoted saying by the Hebrew-language website NRG.

“It is still not clear how much directing from outside there was in the last terror attack and whether this is a Hamas cell with its own hierarchy,” the officer says, referring to the attack last week in which Eitam and Naama Henkin were shot to death while traveling in their car in the West Bank. The five-member cell arrested on suspicion of having carried out the attack was identified by the Shin Bet security services as Hamas members.

The officer admits that the IDF was aware of the cell and explains that the army failed to arrest its members sooner: “We understand they have been preparing for this over the past few weeks, and when we went to arrest them, they didn’t behave like fugitives and didn’t go underground,” he says.

“We didn’t find guns in the homes where they stayed, and apart from one, the commander of the cell, the other are all normative individuals who never spent time in prison. There are cells out there all the time and ever since the first time this one attempted to carry out a terror attack we tried catching them, but were unsuccessful,” he says.

The Hamas cell is alleged to have carried out two shooting attacks that were unsuccessful and in which no civilians were hurt, before the attack last Thursday in which the young couple were murdered in front of their four children.