The closure imposed on Ramallah on Feb. 1 and its partial lifting a day later are telling in terms of disagreement between Israel’s top military brass and the political echelon on how to deal with the lone attacker intifada that broke out in October. Since that time, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been pressed to restrict the movement of residents in Palestinian towns in the West Bank in a bid to prevent them from getting into Israel and carrying out terror attacks. In the aftermath of the Jan. 31 shooting at a roadblock near Bet El by Amjad a-Sukari, a Palestinian police officer, the IDF has been forced, for the first time during this intifada, to impose a closure on Ramallah.

For months, the IDF chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, has staved off demands from the political echelon to impose a closure on the territories, arguing that the damage would far exceed any benefits. “It would be a bitter mistake to impose closures and blockades on the territories. This would be counterproductive for Israel,” Eizenkot said Jan. 18 at a conference held by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), adding that the Palestinian population should be given hope and the possibility to make economic ends meet.

In view of the current situation, the closure of West Bank towns could deal a lethal economic blow to Palestinian residents as well as the Palestinian Authority (PA). Based on what the chief of staff has said, as well as recent security reviews submitted to Cabinet ministers by Israel’s defense chiefs, the IDF and Shin Bet contend that the dire economic situation in the territories was the main catalyst for the current intifada. The working premise is that while such measures as closure could encumber potential assailants to a certain extent, their economic ramifications would encourage many more Palestinians to join the cycle of violence.

The IDF finds itself in a bind. On the one hand, it opposes closures, but on the other hand, it has yet to devise an alternative operational response to present to the government for curbing attacks. In his INSS address, Eizenkot candidly acknowledged that there had been no early warnings about the stabbing attacks that individual Palestinian assailants have been carrying out. “We’ve had 101 such incidents, and we were unable to provide any early warnings whatsoever,” Eizenkot said. That being the case, the IDF’s problem is much more difficult than that. Not only does it lack early warning intelligence to help it avert such attacks, it also has no specific targets to go after to deter or stamp out the phenomenon.