Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), never imagined that he would be touring the area known as the Seam Zone ahead of the 2022 Passover holiday. The area runs parallel to the so-called separation fence between Israel and the West Bank hastily built nearly 20 years ago to block suicide attacks by Palestinians dispatched from the West Bank to massacre Israelis.

According to figures compiled by the Shin Bet security agency, over 700 Israelis were killed in some 150 suicide attacks between 1993 and 2006. In the initial weeks of the wave of Palestinian violence known as the second intifada (2000-2005), a senior unnamed Shin Bet official said that fighting terrorism under current conditions is like trying to “empty the sea with a teaspoon.” Nonetheless, Israel launched a massive counterterrorism campaign (Operation Defensive Shield) in 2002 to crush the West Bank terrorist infrastructure, started construction of the security barrier and achieved a rare victory over terrorism, putting an end to the suicide bombings.

At the time, as commander of the Paratroopers Brigade, Kochavi was tasked with a mission considered largely impossible — dispelling terrorists from the Balata refugee camp in Nablus in the West Bank. The densely crowded Palestinian refugee camps, with their winding narrow alleys and fortifications were impenetrable by tanks or other armored vehicles. Kochavi and the commanders of the infantry forces came up with a brilliant idea: They moved from house to house by sawing their way through the walls. The mission was accomplished and the number of suicide attacks declined.

The intifada was pronounced over in late 2005. Since then, both Israelis and Palestinians have enjoyed a measure of prosperity, disrupted by periodic waves of terrorism, but none as lethal and intense as the suicide bombings of the second intifada or the 1990s.