Two deadly attacks were carried out last week in the West Bank. On Dec. 9, seven Israelis were wounded at the entrance to the West Bank settlement of Ofra, shot from a passing vehicle. A baby delivered prematurely after his mother was injured died at the hospital. Two Israeli soldiers were killed on Dec. 13 at the Givat Asaf junction, near Ofra.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Hamas he would not accept a cease-fire in Gaza while there are terror attacks in the West Bank. Speaking after the second attack in his role as defense minister, he said, “I conveyed a clear message to Hamas: We won’t accept a situation of a truce in Gaza and terror in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]. We will exact a high price for them," he warned.

But the Hamas leadership was unmoved. At a rally to mark the 31st anniversary of the movement's founding on Dec. 16, head of its political bureau Ismail Haniyeh told the crowds, “The West Bank is an integral part of the struggle and of support for the resistance. This resistance will continue.”

Addressing a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands, Haniyeh explained that it is a primary objective of Hamas to demolish President Donald Trump’s “deal of the century,” and promised that the deal would die and be buried in the West Bank. Haniyeh did not try to obscure any fingerprints that Hamas left on the recent West bank attacks. On the contrary, he promised that resistance would continue, though Hamas' military wing did not take responsibility for the attacks in Givat Asaf and at the entrance to Ofra. The IDF believes that a Hamas cell was responsible for both these attacks and that they could not have been carried out without support from Gaza, Turkey and Lebanon. They required the infrastructure that the deputy head of the movement’s political bureau, Saleh al-Arouri, created and continues to maintain.