Weapons Flood West Bank, Fueling Fears of New War Front With Israel
Sune Engel Rasmussen and Benoit Faucon
10–13 minutes

Oct. 25, 2023 12:01 am ET

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AMMAN, Jordan—Long before Hamas militants burst out of their Gaza stronghold to massacre scores of civilians with handguns and assault rifles, Iran and its allies had accelerated efforts to smuggle weapons into a different part of the Palestinian territories, the West Bank.

Using drones, secret airline flights and a land bridge that traverses hundreds of miles and at least four national borders, the smuggling operation is raising the specter of a new conflagration  in the war between Israel and Palestinians. It also poses a growing threat to Jordan, a staunch U.S. ally which borders Israel and the West Bank and has been struggling to contain a growing flow of drugs and arms.

“Iran wants to turn Jordan into a transit area for weapons going into Israel,” said Amer Al-Sabaileh, founder of Security Languages, a counterterrorism think tank in Amman. “But my fear is that the weapons might be used in Jordan as well. Where is the easiest place in the Middle East to punish the U.S. and the West? Jordan,” he said. 

Iran is a patron of Hamas, which it over the years has supplied with money, weapons and training. But as Egypt has cracked down on smuggling routes through the Sinai Peninsula, which borders on the Gaza Strip, Hamas has become increasingly self-reliant on indigenously built weapons, especially rockets.  

The bulk of Iranian weapons to Palestinians go into the West Bank, particularly to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a militant group allied with Hamas, according to a senior Jordanian security official. Both have been designated terrorist organizations by the U.S., Europe and Israel. The official said networks of smugglers, assisted by the Syrian government and Iranian-backed militias like Hezbollah, were growing. 

“The weapons flow has really increased, specifically over the past year. This is because Iran has been much more focused on the West Bank recently, and trying to arm some of the groups there, especially the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is Iran’s more direct partner,” said Michael Horowitz, Israel-based head of intelligence at Le Beck International, a risk consulting firm. 

“This probably explains part of the intelligence failure [during the Hamas attack], because Israel was more focused on the West Bank than Gaza,” Horowitz said.

For more than a decade, Iran has taken advantage of upheaval and corrosion of government authority in the Middle East to cement its footprint in the region. Through a network of loyal militias, Tehran has established a land corridor across Iraq and Syria into Lebanon and, via Jordan, into the West Bank, allowing it to transport troops, equipment and weapons to its allies in the Levant.

Jordan, which has porous borders to war-torn Syria, controlled by Iran’s ally Bashar al-Assad, as well as to the West Bank, has long been vexed by the trafficking of weapons and drugs through its territory. 

Jordanian officials have complained to Syria, and expressed their concerns to European allies, worried that weapons flows into the West Bank would strain its relations with Israel, according to European and Middle Eastern officials.

Weapons smuggled into Jordan include Iranian replicas of U.S.-made Claymore antipersonnel mines, M4-style assault rifles, TNT and other explosives and handguns, according to the senior Jordanian official. Terrorgence, an information network that includes advisers to Israeli police, said in October that Israeli border forces had confiscated antipersonnel mines manufactured in Iran and Russia.

Going across the Syrian border into Jordan, the arms are hidden in trucks going through official border crossings or carried across the vast desert expanses, which in the winter are shrouded in fog and dust. 

Drones, a new tool of warfare for nonstate actors, are also handy for smuggling. In February, Jordanian agents caught the first unmanned aerial vehicle from Syria carrying hand grenades—four of them. A commercial drone, bought cheap online and fairly easy to maneuver, can also carry two assault rifles, and is very difficult to detect, another Jordanian security official responsible for monitoring the Syrian border said.

“We only see drones by chance,” he said.  

Iran has used other means to transport weapons. In February, after a devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria, Esmail Qaani, commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force, which is responsible for the Revolutionary Guard’s foreign operations, visited the Syrian city of Aleppo, ostensibly to supervise aid deliveries. Qaani flew to Syria in an aircraft owned by Mahan, an airline that has been sanctioned by the U.S. for flying militants and weapons from Iran to Syria. 

Soon after Qaani’s visit, the airline, under the guise of delivering aid, began hauling large quantities of weapons to Syria, according to a Central Intelligence Agency operative in the region, a Syrian government adviser and a European security official.

It is unclear how many weapons are smuggled into the Palestinian territories, and whether some of the weapons end up in Gaza, via Israeli proper, though the vast majority going through Jordan appears destined for the West Bank, regional security officials say. 

The Israeli army last year said there had been a “significant rise” in detected attempts to smuggle weapons and drugs into Israel from Jordan and Egypt. From March 2021 to April this year, Israeli police thwarted at least 35 smuggling attempts from Jordan, seizing more than 800 weapons, according to a tally by the Washington Institute think tank.

“The Iranians are investing lots of efforts in inflaming all arenas, in the north and the West Bank alike,” a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces said. “The IDF is reinforcing the troops and ready for every possibility.”

Traffickers in Jordan profit from the country’s large black market in arms, where guns trade for about one-fourth of the price in the Palestinian territories, according to licensed arms dealers in the capital, Amman. An AK-47 sells for as much as $20,000 in the West Bank, and an M16 rifle for $30,000, according to an arms dealer in the West Bank. 

“The country is awash with weapons,” said a gun shop owner in downtown Amman. Prices on the black market are roughly the same as his: from $700 for a Czech 7mm to $4,200 for an Austrian Glock. 

In May, a Jordanian lawmaker, Imad al-Adwan, was detained trying to smuggle more than 200 firearms, including 12 assault rifles, across the Allenby Bridge into the West Bank. Israel extradited Adwan to Jordan where he faces trial and up to 15 years in prison. He and 13 other defendants are expected to respond to the charges in court this week. 

Palestinian groups have built sizable caches of weapons. In July, Israeli forces carried out their largest assault on the West Bank in decades, targeting militant facilities and weapons depots in Jenin that belonged to the Iran-allied Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, seizing about 1,000 weapons and hundreds of explosive devices. They also dismantled six bomb-making facilities. Twelve Palestinians were killed, most of them militants, 30 suspects were arrested and hundreds of people were displaced.

Portions of the West Bank are policed by the Palestinian Authority, which is dominated by Fatah, a faction opposed to Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In the past two years, Palestinian police have seized about 600 to 1,000 weapons annually in the West Bank, more than twice the number before 2021, police spokesman Louay Zreikat said, adding that about 60% of those weapons were used for self-protection or criminal activities.

Following Hamas’ attack earlier this month, Israeli security forces have intensified a two-year crackdown on Palestinians in the West Bank, and settlers have attacked protesters and civilians. On Friday, 13 Palestinians were killed in a 30-hour long Israeli military operation against militants in refugee camps in Tulkarem. That came after 55 people were killed in the first week after Oct. 7, the deadliest week for West Bank Palestinians since at least 2005, according to the United Nations. 

Anger over the crackdown and the Gaza bombings, paired with an increasingly heavily armed West Bank, poses a problem for the governing Palestinian Authority, whose grip on security has slipped as new militant groups have jockeyed for power, and residents resort to violence rather than turn to law enforcement to resolve internal disputes. 

An arms dealer in Al-Ram in the West Bank said he sells hundreds of weapons every month, mostly to people who are organizing to defend their villages in the absence of coordinated Palestinian security. 

“There’s a big demand nowadays,” he said, “but I tell you all of them are very young.” 

The absence of a viable candidate to replace 87-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, whose popularity has long been waning, adds to volatility in the territory as loyalists of competing prospective candidates acquire arms and jostle for power. 

The Palestinian Authority didn’t reply to a request for comment. 

Horowitz said an ignition of the West Bank could lead to a “cycle of violence,” with the Israeli army deploying more forces, and settlers carrying out more revenge attacks against Palestinians.

For Jordan, stemming the flow of weapons is a Herculean task. The Kingdom is to some extent a victim of its geography. Its long northern border is largely unguarded on the Syrian side, due to lack of cooperation from the Assad government, and its frontier with Israel isn’t protected by significant fencing, making it a viable route for large-scale smuggling.

Jordan this year has made nine weapons seizures on the border, compared to seven in 2022 and 21 in 2021, according to the senior security official. 

Years ago, at the peak of Islamic State’s reign, many weapons smuggled into Jordan were destined for Sunni terrorist groups, but now they are mostly traded for commercial gain, said Mohammad Afeef, a former president of Jordan’s State Security Court. 

He warned that if security continued to deteriorate, the high concentration of weapons could in time benefit terrorist sleeper cells. That should worry the West, he said.

“Jordan is playing a pivotal role in preventing smuggling of narcotics and weapons,” Afeef said. “It is a huge burden for us.”

Suha Ma’ayeh and Fatima AbdulKarim contributed to this article.

Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at sune.rasmussen@wsj.com and Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com