Redeploying combat divisions tests army authority

The military has pulled the Ninety-Eighth Division entirely out of its ongoing assignments. That redeployment shifts a full headquarters into the West Bank to take territorial control amid escalating internal friction and external violence. It leaves frontline commands stretched thin across multiple borders.

I'm Yoni.

And I'm Ari. This is another episode of All Fronts, a Daily Lion production, where we put a week of Israel's security into one picture.

We're starting with a pardon. President Isaac Herzog has erased the criminal record of a former soldier convicted of manslaughter. And he did that overriding the objections of the military's top command. The soldier is Elor Azaria. The incident began on March twenty-fourth, twenty sixteen. Two armed Palestinians stabbed an Israeli soldier at a post in Hebron, prompting troops to open fire. Azaria was convicted of killing a wounded and incapacitated Palestinian attacker. He ultimately received an eighteen-month sentence that was reduced to fourteen, of which he served nine. He was released from prison in twenty eighteen. But the conviction was meant to stay on his civilian record until twenty thirty-two. The Defense Minister had formally requested the clemency in July to lift the lingering civilian burdens on the thirty-year-old.

For proponents of military reform, the rules of engagement have become a dangerous burden. Writing in The Jerusalem Post, one commentator who spent three decades in uniform argues that ethical guidelines have morphed into a source of fear for troops on the ground. In his view, the rigid enforcement of what the military calls purity of arms paralyzes soldiers. They're forced to make split-second decisions under fire. And that leaves them terrified of judicial micromanagement. In this view, erasing the criminal record corrects a historic overreach. For them, the pardon, granted on September nineteenth, provides necessary personal relief to a soldier who faced an overzealous legal establishment. For this camp, the president's decision is a long-overdue signal. It shows the system will finally back its combat soldiers over the demands of military lawyers.

Former military spokesman Peter Lerner hears the opposite: a devastating blow to military discipline. Erasing that penalty now, he says, without any expression of remorse from the soldier, undermines the commanders tasked with enforcing the law. The original trial sparked intense political intimidation. Protesters chanted, Gadi Gadi beware, Rabin seeks a friend, at the chief of staff who pursued the prosecution. Overriding the military justice system today, he argues, signals to officers that upholding the rules of engagement invites political punishment. And he warns this internal breakdown directly threatens the country's legal defense abroad. Israel's reliance on its own internal probes is its primary shield against foreign intervention. But it's already under intense pressure.

The pardon is done and the record is clean. What's left is how it's heard. The soldiers it was meant to reassure hear one thing. The commanders who have to enforce the same rules tomorrow may hear another.

From the army to the police, the protests over the police shooting in Umm al-Fahm are escalating. Two hundred people protested at the city entrance on September nineteenth, two days after Alaa Mahameed was killed on Route sixty-five. He was the ninth Arab citizen killed by police gunfire since the start of this year, following twelve killed in twenty twenty-five. Since the year two thousand, police have killed one hundred and thirty-three Arab citizens. In Local Call, the case is that systemic police violence and state-backed provocations are driving it. In that telling, Arab citizens face a trigger-happy lethal force protected by institutional impunity. His brother Omar argues this is exactly what the political leadership wants. He notes officers would never dare treat Jewish citizens the same way. The Umm al-Fahm shooting is viewed as an unprovoked execution. His older brother Khaled says the video shows four fully equipped officers surrounding a man who wasn't resisting, shooting him in the stomach at point-blank range. The officer who fired got five days house arrest. Activists see a continuous pattern of zero accountability. When fifty-seven-year-old Ahmad Said al-Na'ami was killed in May, police initially claimed he endangered officers. When Murshed Abd al-Hai was shot twice in the leg in the year twenty twenty-four, medical teams were delayed, and the investigation was closed after twenty-one months. The community is urged to sustain its fight for justice, twenty-six years after thirteen citizens were killed in the October two thousand events.

The right puts the root cause somewhere else entirely. For Mida, the primary driver of the friction is growing nationalist radicalism, armed lawlessness, and terror support within the Arab sector that threatens state sovereignty. They describe the massive accumulation of illicit firearms as an acute national security crisis that increasingly intersects with terror. The police reported that about eighty percent of the three thousand six hundred and sixty-one illegal weapons seized in the first half of twenty nineteen were taken in the Arab sector. In twenty twenty-four alone, fourteen significant terror attacks were carried out inside Israel by Israeli Arabs, including five by Bedouin from the Negev. In Mida's telling, this ideological threat is compounded by political incitement and identification with terrorist organizations, which fuel subversion and open confrontations against law enforcement. The counter-terrorism law sets a prison sentence of up to three years for expressing identification with a terrorist organization. And Mida accuses political leaders of walking a dangerous line. When asked directly if Hamas is a terrorist organization that must be eliminated, Ra'am leader Mansour Abbas said he has an unequivocal answer but refused to actually say it.

Ask the security establishment pragmatists and the focus shifts back to the immediate danger of wartime provocations. In this view, reckless ideological provocations by Jewish extremists risk opening an unnecessary and disastrous internal armed front. The specific fear is that importing provocative agricultural outposts from the West Bank into the Galilee threatens to ignite a wide-scale armed confrontation with Arab citizens. Unauthorized agricultural outposts in the Galilee are already inflaming land grievances from the Land Day protests of March nineteen seventy-six. They understood the immense risk of a broad violent conflict with Israeli Arabs following the events of Operation Guardian of the Walls in May twenty twenty-one. With the military already stretched across multiple external fronts, they argue the state simply can't afford to let these provocations spark another internal war.

So the protests go on, and each reading wants something different done first. Officers held to account. The illegal guns taken off the streets. Or the outposts stopped before they start a fight nobody can afford.

Further east, the military has placed its forces in the West Bank on maximum alert. That follows a string of deadly attacks just before the autumn holidays. Near Neve Tzuf, a Palestinian gunman opened fire. And at the Maccabim checkpoint, a driver rammed his vehicle into a patrol.

That's when the army announced reinforcements, including the Ninety-Eighth Division's headquarters, the redeployment we opened with.

Former National Security Council official Amit Aviram argues that violence carried out by Jewish groups has escalated into a direct threat to national security. What is happening now is a pattern of organized raids on Palestinian villages involving dozens of violent participants. In the village of Jalud, an army estimate found that approximately one hundred settlers took part in a recent riot. Those in the center say the military is failing to enforce the law or take responsibility for its operational helplessness. When the army aborted a mission to return an expelled Palestinian family to their home, the IDF Spokesperson simply announced the task was not completed because of the violence. The military issued routine statements condemning vandalism and calling to bring perpetrators to justice. They see this as an institutional evasion of duty. Aviram argues this internal friction is forcing them to pull critical combat assets away from active war fronts. The decision to allocate one additional division headquarters to the West Bank is a direct result of these operational demands. It stretches an already overcommitted army. He says halting this breakdown requires immediate government intervention and binding security coordination. Government policy has led to the establishment of many dozens of agricultural outposts in Area C. That expands the friction on the ground. The Defense Ministry established one inter-ministerial directorate this year to handle educational care for youth involved in the outposts. And he says the situation demands restored administrative detention powers to actually suppress the violence.

For the right, the focus on settler violence is a politicized campaign to obscure the actual security threat. Commentary in Ynet argues this focus distorts reality by ignoring relentless Palestinian terrorism. Over a single Friday and Saturday, six attacks on Jewish farmers were recorded. The column says residents of the nearby village of al-Mughayyir were responsible for eleven cases of sheep poisoning on surrounding farms. In its telling, the actual terror threat is massive and organized, fueled by online incitement videos declaring they're coming for Jerusalem. On Yom Kippur, the IDF arrested two terrorists in Qabatiya about to carry out an attack, two weeks after arresting a terror cell of five operatives in the same town. And the column says that when the former Shin Bet chief presented a list of eight Arab casualties attributed to settler violence, it turned out soldiers had shot them. On this side, Jewish violence is an exaggerated, marginal phenomenon. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu characterized its entirety as one hundred and fifty youths throwing stones and chopping down olive trees. That recent ramming attack happened three days after a Palestinian gunman killed an Israeli father of six. After that shooting, Israeli troops searched approximately one hundred locations in Biddu. An hour later, soldiers thwarted a separate car-ramming attempt at the Ganim military post, killing one attacker and detaining a second. They say the threat extends underground, and requires a total military crackdown. In Qalqilya, police uncovered a terror tunnel reaching a depth of twenty-five meters, arresting four suspects at the site and seizing sniper rifles, ammunition, and fertilizer. For this camp, the mission is clear. Palestinian terrorism seeks to uproot the people of Israel from their land, and the military must settle scores with all of them across every front.

So the Ninety-Eighth is in place, and it's being asked for two different things. One side wants it to stop the raids on villages. The other wants it to break the terror cells.

And at the front, on Friday in northern Gaza, an explosive drone operated by Israeli forces unexpectedly turned back. And it crashed into an army outpost. The detonation killed two reservists. That prompted the military to immediately ground all attack and munition-dropping drones across active combat sectors pending an inquiry. The Sixteenth Brigade had been operating in northern Gaza since September tenth, utilizing tactical UAVs to target militants. The fatal crash killed twenty-four-year-old Nadav Kali and twenty-three-year-old Ofek Moalem. Both were combat soldiers in the brigade's Battalion seven thousand and seven. The Prime Minister stressed that all necessary lessons must be learned and implemented to ensure the safety of the troops.

The loss has drawn deep mourning from national leaders. Netanyahu expressed grief over the incident, calling them courageous soldiers who defended the country's security. Moalem had recently finished his first year studying mechanical engineering in Jerusalem. A close childhood friend recalled how happy Moalem was in the reserves. He noted that he stepped into a command role because he couldn't sit on the sidelines. The tragedy compounds recent losses for the communities involved. Kali lived in Har Halutz right across the street from a former classmate who was killed fighting in the Gaza Strip in November twenty twenty-three. The Misgav Regional Council issued a statement saying it bows its head and shares in the grief of the Kali family.

There's a wider argument about drones this week. Researchers at JISS argue that cheap commercial devices overturn the economics of air defense. They note that an off-the-shelf drone costing anywhere from hundreds to a few thousand dollars can now be deployed to strike civilian infrastructure. Or it can disrupt an expensive defensive system. That economic imbalance is being weaponized on an industrial scale by hostile adversaries. They're fielding advanced low-altitude evasion doctrines to overwhelm Israeli borders, with Iran reportedly producing roughly sixty thousand drones of various types every month. They're adopting Russian designs developed in Ukraine. And that's backed by a twenty twenty-seven Russian budget allocating one trillion rubles for the production of standard and jet-powered suicide drones. The resulting jet models reach speeds of approximately six hundred kilometers per hour, featuring low radar signatures and advanced evasion capabilities. Against that saturation threat, domestic air defense is compromised by fragmented inter-agency oversight and obsolete civil aviation regulations. The existing Israeli legal framework governing airspace was drafted more than thirty years ago. It was built for a technological reality that can't govern dual-use drone proliferation. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a directive and warning about this evolving global threat in August twenty twenty-six, describing a shift that's changing the battlefield.

The grounding stays until the inquiry finds what turned that drone around. The researchers' worry doesn't wait for it. Cheap drones by the thousands, against defenses built for expensive missiles.

From Gaza to Lebanon, the diplomatic frameworks meant to stabilize the northern border rely on a central mechanism: the Lebanese Armed Forces stepping in to enforce a buffer zone. Two years after the coordinated pager detonations and the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, attention has shifted to the military tasked with keeping Hezbollah out of the south. The scrutiny crystallized late last month following a tactical clash at Deir Mimas. The incident prompted a public examination of who exactly is commanding the Lebanese units on the border. It brought the demographic and political makeup of the state's official military into the center of the security debate.

For Israeli security researchers, relying on the Lebanese military to secure the border is a dangerous illusion because the army itself is deeply compromised. They point out that Hezbollah intentionally exploits the demographic balance of the state's armed forces to build a network of sympathy and active cooperation within the ranks. The numbers dictate the reality on the ground, with approximately fifty percent of the soldiers in the Lebanese military coming from the Shiite community. In their telling, many of these troops and their commanding officers actively assist Hezbollah, aligning with its interests or taking direct orders from its operatives. Because of this infiltration, deploying these units to the south creates a severe operational risk. Pro-Hezbollah officers and intelligence personnel embedded in these border deployments have the power to engineer tactical clashes with Israeli forces. By manufacturing a localized escalation, a rogue field commander could intentionally sabotage any ceasefire or diplomatic framework, serving Hezbollah's strategic goals from inside a Lebanese uniform.

On September twenty-third, the Hezbollah-aligned newspaper Al-Akhbar responded directly to all of this public scrutiny. They completely reject any attempt to police the army's ranks, asking publicly whether Israel or Lebanese commanders get to decide the identity of the soldiers. And the newspaper also asked who's actually entitled to serve in the Lebanese military down in the south.

Any arrangement on the northern border leans on that army. Whether its units in the south take their orders from Beirut or from Hezbollah decides if the deal on paper holds on the ground.

From Lebanon to the Gulf, persistent Houthi drone and missile assaults have prompted a new and covert intelligence sharing arrangement between the Israeli military and Saudi authorities. United States Central Command is brokering the coordination. And that follows a quiet gathering of regional military chiefs at a secluded German ski resort.

The case from the Misgav Institute is that Israel must avoid launching a unilateral military campaign against the Houthis right now. The think tank held an online situation assessment on September twenty-second. They concluded that the military should refrain from initiating an independent front. The researchers argue that the renewed civil war in Yemen is keeping the Houthis focused on internal warfare and regional positioning. And that fighting broke out after a relative lull lasting around four years. Because the militia's occupied with domestic conquests, the paper advises using this window to offer intelligence and technological cooperation to an isolated Saudi Arabia. That secures strategic ties without offering concessions on the Palestinian issue.

The Jerusalem Post argues that the collapse of regional defense arrangements has left Saudi Arabia reliant on Israeli intelligence. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed the Mecca Pact defense agreement on August seventh. But the Houthis initiated a major wave of attacks against Saudi targets on September eighth. And the pact failed to provide concrete military protection. Pakistan's military spokesman insisted in his words that his country fully stands with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia both diplomatically and physically. He promised they would go to any extent. But no allied troops intervened. That failure pushed Riyadh to seek direct American assistance. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met Admiral Brad Cooper in Jeddah on September fourteenth amid the escalating Houthi attacks. The following day, Washington agreed to offer targeted assistance to Saudi Arabia. The paper says the resulting framework relies heavily on Israeli surveillance. The newspaper notes that covert strategic cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Israel has spanned a sixty-year history. And one American research institute describes the new intelligence sharing as resembling the support relationship Israel currently maintains with the United Arab Emirates.

For now it runs quietly, through CENTCOM, for as long as the Houthi attacks keep coming.

That's the picture as best we can see it. All Fronts is a Daily Lion production. Don't forget to tune in to the other Daily Lion shows: Sixty One, Crosswinds, and Tribe & State. See you next Wednesday.