The military has successfully held back the Iranian axis from smuggling weapons across the Israel-Jordan border into the West bank to flood the area with higher quality terror threats, IDF Col. Aviv Amir, commander of the Jordan Valley defenses, said on Tuesday at his outgoing ceremony, the Jerusalem Post has learned.
One of Israel's greatest ongoing security challenges given its progress on many other fronts is its weak and relatively porous border with Jordan, something which Tehran has tried to exploit in recent years to advance far more deadly terror attacks by Palestinians in the West Bank against Israelis.
This threat has become so significant that Defense Minister Israel Katz has made one of his primary focuses investing in a new much more secure border fence, to the tune of NIS 5.2 billion, on a front which was once ignored completely.
Chief of operations for Southern Command
Amir's next post will be as the chief of operations for the Southern Command, a sign that the IDF believes he was successful in his high stakes task.
"Two years ago, we started a journey to defend our homeland. Even then, this front was heating up after a few terror attacks in the area. The land was the same land, but the operational challenges grew substantially," said Amir, in portions of the remarks which the Post obtained, but which were not part of the summary highlighted for the media.
He continued, "The smuggling grew into being institutionalized with the support of the axis of evil [Iran's axis of proxies], and many terror attacks started to flow through from the western side of this front."
Further, Amir said that his forces worked day and night, under great personal stress, to keep up with a much faster pace of combating terror in the area.
Also, he said that he and his soldiers worked hard to learn from their mistakes and this helped them improve substantially in their fight against the evolving terror threat from Iran and its West Bank terror proxies.
Still, he said there will always be more work to do to keep up with the ongoing threats.
Moreover, Amir said that his forces had killed 85 terrorists, seized over 500 weapons, thwarted around 40 smuggling attempts, and caught around 120 persons trying to infiltrate the border.
IDF Central Commander Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth said that Amir had succeeded in shifting his forces' conceptual approach to the new terror trends, in adding a large number of new border military positions, and in adding and incorporating portions of the new Gilad Division (96).
IDF Col. Gilad Schwecki replaces Amir in the border command role.
Building the new Israel-Jordan fence was a goal that Katz's predecessor, Yoav Gallant, had tried to achieve progress on and failed.
It is unclear exactly how Katz brought the Finance Ministry on board on this issue, and if it was more his better interpersonal relations with Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich or merely the timing that the government would not push forward with such a big initiative while it was fighting hard against Hezbollah and Hamas in 2024.
But whatever the background, the fact is that Katz got this NIS 5.2 billion project through which Gallant had been unable to move.
Sources said Katz went all-in to make sure Iran could not smuggle weapons into the West Bank and cause Israel new strategic threats.
