The United States Should Apply the Gaza Ceasefire’s Stipulations to West Bank Terrorist Organizations 

Days after U.S. President Donald Trump’s 20-point ceasefire plan was announced, senior Hamas member Zaher Jabarin directed attention to the West Bank, where Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades operate. Jabarin described the territory as key in the terror group’s campaign against Israel, and warned that continued Israeli policy, including attempts to “Judaize” Jerusalem, would set off a powder keg in the West Bank. The threat was not mere bluster; it was a warning to Israel’s security establishment that Hamas envisions a violent future for the West Bank. 

Currently, Hamas’s future is in limbo. The group agreed to the first phase of Trump’s plan, which entailed the release of all remaining Israeli hostages, both living and deceased, in exchange for a partial IDF withdrawal from Gaza and the release of Palestinian detainees from Israeli prisons, including other stipulations. Subsequent phases of the ceasefire dictate that Hamas must disarm and step back from governance in the war-torn enclave.   

This disarmament is hypothetical since Hamas has not agreed to anything beyond the first phase of the ceasefire. Some may even label the prospects of a Hamas disarmament in Gaza as a pipe dream. Still, it illuminates another question: Should the United States stipulate that Hamas be disarmed in the West Bank, not just Gaza? 

Fundamentally, the answer is yes.  

Hamas is a terrorist organization whose leaders and members are principally split between Gaza and Qatar. And while Gaza has always served as the organization’s nerve center, the West Bank has been its second home for decades, and a key territory in the Islamic Republic of Iran’s “unification of arenas” doctrine.  

Disarming Hamas in Gaza would effectively hobble the group’s activities in the coastal enclave. But without applying similar stipulations to Hamas in the West Bank, the Islamist organization and its allies will renew their efforts to foment terrorism on Israel’s doorstep.  

The Jewish state cannot have a “de-radicalized terror-free zone” in Gaza while the same enemy operates miles from the capital and other major cities without the same constraints. 

President Trump has demonstrated that the United States has the political clout to compel some of Hamas’s allies to pressure the Islamist group into accepting political deals that it may initially oppose. While Hamas is an independent entity, it relies heavily on allies like Qatar and Turkey that also seek Trump’s favor.  

Hamas’s significantly diminished state in Gaza, coupled with months of sustained Israel Defense Forces (IDF) operations in the West Bank, has created an opportunity for the United States to impose the Gaza ceasefire’s stipulations on Hamas in the West Bank.  

After all, the White House has signaled it has an ambitious goal: to bring “lasting peace to the Middle East.” Why not seize the opportunity to take a step closer to achieving that goal while Hamas is weakened? The opportunity will not last forever. 

While Hamas’s actions in Gaza have received the lion’s share of media attention since the atrocities of October 7, 2023, terrorist activity by the Islamist group and other Palestinian factions in the West Bank has been less visible.  

It has been almost eleven months since the beginning of Operation “Iron Wall,” an IDF initiative in the West Bank to root out a campaign of terrorism waged by Palestinian armed groups and their backers. Since then, the IDF has stymied the export of terrorism that plagued Israeli communities on both sides of the Green Line. The results of the IDF’s operation paid off in April 2025, a month that recorded the lowest number of West Bank attacks in five years.  

Since then, however, Hamas and its allies have continued to operate in the West Bank. In June, Israel’s internal security service, the Shabak, hailed the arrest of some 60 Hamas members across the West Bank as the “largest and most complex investigation” in the West Bank in a decade.   

The Islamist group’s allied Palestinian extremist organizations also showed signs of resurgence in the territory, creating an environment ripe for Hamas to reestablish itself should diplomatic or military pressure weaken its Gaza branch.  

PIJ exemplified this trend when it announced in October that it had launched a campaign that targeted IDF drones and other reconnaissance assets in the West Bank. “All our military formations continue to inflict pain on the enemy through new field tactics according to the realities and conditions of the battlefield,” the group stated.  

Complicating matters, Tehran demonstrated that its 12-day war with Israel in June had not deterred it from pursuing its long-standing policy of supporting Palestinian terrorist groups. Israel’s internal security agency, the Shin Bet, accused Iran in early October of smuggling advanced arms to terrorist groups in the West Bank. The agency revealed that it had confiscated a shipment of 29 claymore-type explosives, four drones, of which two were explosive, 15 anti-tank missiles, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, 20 hand grenades, 53 pistols, seven rifles, nine machine guns, and 750 rounds of pistol ammunition.  

If Iran’s attempts to smuggle heavy weaponry into the West Bank were not troubling enough for Israel, they were far from the only threat emanating from Tehran. 

The IDF’s discovery of a homemade rocket in the northern West Bank town of Tulkarem on September 24, just days after dismantling a terror cell near Ramallah, which produced dozens of crude projectiles, was a significant development. Following the two incidents, Israeli security officials reportedly assessed that “foreign elements, led by Iran,” were working to establish rocket launching capabilities in the West Bank — akin to those possessed by pre-war Hamas in Gaza — that could target central Israeli cities like Tel Aviv, Kfar Saba, Ra’anana, Netanya, Afula, and Beit She’an.  

These recent activities by armed Palestinian terror groups, statements from their leaders, Israeli counterterrorism operations, Iranian efforts to foment chaos in the West Bank, and the release of hundreds of terrorists to the contested region during recent Gaza ceasefires not only demonstrates that terrorism is on the rise in the territory but that Hamas and its allies are carrying out a deliberate campaign to destabilize the West Bank once again.  

In the optimistic scenario that sees Hamas in Gaza voluntarily comply with disarmament (or being militarily compelled into doing so), a counterterrorism plan will be needed to combat West Bank branches of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations to prevent their reconstitution right on Israel’s doorstep, a threat that would loom even closer than Gaza. 

This can be accomplished by demanding that the same stipulations that apply to Hamas, for example, in Gaza, be applied to branches of Hamas in the West Bank. Otherwise, the threat is simply being shifted from being contained in Gaza to being dispersed around Israeli communities in the West Bank, presenting a future decentralized terrorism threat that could see Israel’s major population centers become the target of future attacks in a post-ceasefire paradigm. 

Aaron Goren is a research analyst and editor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Joe Truzman is a senior research analyst and editor at FDD’s Long War Journal (LWJ).