Palestinian terror organizations poised for imminent large-scale attacks on Israeli troops and West Bankers

DEBKAfile Intelligence

August 26, 2005, 1:40 PM (GMT+02:00)

The small-scale strikes this week were the preface for assault plans thoroughly prepared behind the screen of the terror slowdown in recent weeks.

Thursday, Aug 25, Palestinian spokesmen seized on the killing of five armed Palestinians resisting arrests in a Tulkarm shootout as a convenient pretext and provocation. However, Israel’s dismantling of Gaza communities was constantly accompanied by Hamas vows to pursue its violent campaign until the last Israeli was dead or out of Palestine and al Qaeda-Palestine’s publication of five threatening communiqués.

The night before the Tulkarm clash, Shmuel Matt, 21, from London, was stabbed to death in the Old City of Jerusalem in an attack on three Yeshiva students that was claimed by al Qaeda-Palestine, a new player on the expanding anti-Israel terror stage.

DEBKAfile’s military sources reveal that Hizballah’s triple rocket attack on northern Israel Thursday, Aug. 25, was no accident, as some Israeli sources have claimed. The rockets of 240mm caliber were fired from a Hizballah site in Wadi Salouki near Majdal Silam, northeast of Bint Jubeil. They caused no casualties One hit the Moshav Margiot henhouse, a second landed opposite Kibbutz Yiftah, while the third exploded on the Lebanese side of the border.

Our military experts see in this attack the launch of Hizballah’s post-disengagement strategy according to a new rulebook. The Lebanese terrorists were retaliating for the Israeli raid in the West Bank town of Tulkarm. At least two of the Palestinians killed were either Hizballah agents or Fatah-Al Aqsa Brigade operatives which the outside group controlled and funded. By striking back on behalf of its Palestinian partners, the Hizballah lets them continue to claim they are observing a partial lull.

Israel has so far made no response to the dangerous evolution of the terror front as an interlinked and transnational organism.

The Palestinians were by the same token testing Israel’s military reflexes when they fired two missiles that missed Sderot on the same day as the Hizballah shooting. When the IDF failed to respond, the Hamas, the Jihad Islami and the al Aqsa Brigades decided to go forward with their pre-charted campaigns to start hitting Israeli soldiers and West Bank residents in the very near future.