“You cannot see anything happening in the Middle East without Iran’s fingerprints on it almost,” exclaimed Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, who recently received “briefings by various governmental officials” who are “uncovering more advanced weaponry that’s coming into Judea and Samaria from Iran.”

Judea and Samaria

In recent weeks, Israeli security forces have seized large quantities of weapons in Judea and Samaria in overnight raids, in an attempt to counter Iran’s smuggling operations that have taken place since at least last spring. “There’s [an] investigation going on [to see whether] the recent bus explosions that took place may have been a diversion for possibly another invasion coming from Judea and Samaria,” Perkins related.

Israel’s enemies may indeed be plotting another October 7-style attack, this time from Judea and Samaria. “in the summer of ’23, we actually thought the terrorist attack was going to come from Judea and Samaria,” said Heritage Foundation Vice President Victoria Coates, who served as a deputy national security advisor in the first Trump administration, on “Washington Watch.” “This is an ongoing threat, right in the heart of Israel.”

The ongoing threat provides further evidence that the long-discussed two-state solution is “not workable,” Perkins declared. “The Palestinian Authority,” which ostensibly governs Judea and Samaria, “is actually not much different than Hamas, in terms of their governance and their tactics and their refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist,” he added, not to mention the fact that “Judea and Samaria [together are] like 24 times the size of Gaza.”

“However logical that might have seemed 50 years ago, at this point, it’s not just apples and oranges, it’s strawberries and sharks that we’re talking about,” Coates concurred. “You’ve got a very successful, prosperous nation in Israel that’s now one of the top 15 most powerful countries in the world, a technological leader, a bastion of democracy in the Middle East, and a great partner to the United States. And then you have the Palestinians, who are essentially a basket case.”

“The Palestinian Authority is broken, and there’s going to have to be some other kind of mechanism to govern the Palestinians, [because] they’re in no way able to establish any institutions of civil society,” she continued. “They failed utterly over the last 50 years to do it. They’re dependent on international aid organizations like the United Nations because they can’t organize themselves.”

Indeed, the uneasy status of Judea and Samaria only works to the benefit of Iran, which maintains terrorist proxies in the region, intent on causing harm to Israel. “Their wings do not seem to be clipped at all,” Perkins warned. “Even though they’ve lost a number of their proxies, they are doubling down.”

Hamas

Since Iran’s gang of proxies jumped Israel in a dark alley, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have managed to knock down several assailants, while defending themselves on numerous fronts. Supported by devastating airstrikes, the IDF rolled through both the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon, obliterating Hezbollah’s command structure and peeling away Hamas’s control on Gaza one tunnel at a time. At present, both of Iran’s forward outposts have called a truce with Israel to lick their wounds.

But “while Israel has been dealing with the proxies of Iran and [has] dealt them some significant blows, it’s clear that the Islamic Republic continues to pose a threat not only to Israel, but to the rest of the world,” predicted Perkins.

The good news for Israel is that they now have a friend in Washington who will let them succeed. When Hamas refused to release further hostages under the current ceasefire, the Trump administration endorsed Israel’s decision to withhold aid, while simultaneously approving major weapons sales the Biden administration had tabled.

“Quite frankly, this should have been done a year ago,” Coates declared. “The amount of aid that’s poured into Gaza is staggering. And, you’ve never had a situation where you’re asking one aggrieved party, the attacked party, to feed the enemy while they’re at war with them.”

In any event, “Hamas cannot be allowed to reconstitute itself and attack again,” contended Coates, “because that’s what they will do. They told the hostages that they released, on their way out, ‘Don’t live down by Gaza because we’re going to come for you again.’ They have absolutely no intention of reforming or becoming any kind of a responsible element in Palestinian society.”

“So, for anyone who actually cares about the Palestinians — which Hamas does not — they should support this effort to eradicate them,” she continued, “because all they are doing is trapping the Palestinians in Gaza in this cycle of intolerable violence and extremism. And they have no opportunities to … revise their society, build anything new.”

Coates may be preaching to the choir, because it seems that Israel has little intention of living side by side with Hamas ever again. “They still plan on accomplishing one of their war goals, and that is the elimination of Hamas,” Perkins assured viewers. But one reason they agreed to the recent ceasefire — besides the opportunity to get their hostages out — is that it “falls at a time when they’re reworking the IDF, [with] a new chief of staff coming in. I think this is allowing them time,” said Perkins, “with an understanding that Iran is still the most significant threat that Israel … is facing.”

“President Trump inherited an Iran that was very different than the one he handed over to President Biden in January of 2021, when they were starved of resources, they had severe domestic problems, they were unable to fund their proxies,” agreed Coates. “The four years of the Biden administration have made the mullahs in Tehran fat and happy. And they’ve poured those resources that they’ve gotten from illicit oil sales — mostly to China — into their proxies … but also into this nuclear program.”

Nuclear Program

Speaking of Iran’s nuclear program, the Islamic regime has put that into hyperdrive, enriching uranium at a frenetic pace, as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported, while they “have made great strides with their missile capabilities,” Coates noted. “The IAEA can’t do much about it, but they can expose it.”

“Then the question becomes: What is Israel going to do about it? And what is the Trump administration going to do about it?” she asked. “This is going to be the critical question for President Trump. He’s been very clear that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon on his watch. But … you can say that, but then what are you going to do about it?”

“The Israeli strike on Iran in October really did provide a window of opportunity, because they exposed how worthless Russian-imported, Iranian missile defense systems were — that they can reach out and touch them,” said Coates. “And with the additional U.S.-supplied arms, the question is, can they do it on their own?”

But time is on Iran’s side, as their terrorist proxies recover, and as they inch ever closer to a nuclear weapon.

“If Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu is going to take an action, I would encourage it to be decisive,” Coates urged. “We’ve been doing incremental strikes over the course of last year. We had the first direct attack from Iran on Israel — that sort of changed the paradigm a little bit — and then Israel retaliating. But I wouldn’t do a small message strike at this point. That’s been done. If you’re going to go in and take out the nuclear program, we need to take it out and, as you said, set them back decades.”

But Coates added that Israel should “be prepared for a series of Iranian retaliations.” Although Iran may be vulnerable to Israeli airstrikes, they are not powerless. “Hezbollah and Hamas are pretty degraded. But, as you mentioned, they do have forces in Judea and Samaria. And then there are always the Houthis in Yemen, who have been threatening to act up again if the ceasefire is broken.”

The question left in Coates’s mind is “the United States’ posture to support Israel, not just on the day of any strike, but in the days afterwards when Iran might retaliate,” because “that’s when they’re really going to need help.” Despite recent rumblings about Ukraine and NATO, the Trump administration has so far shown no signs of wavering in its support for Israel.

“We are at a new level of direct confrontation,” Perkins concluded. “We’re at a very volatile point. And the next move does need to be decisive.”