Middle East Crisis Israeli Teen Whose Disappearance Led to Riot Is Found Dead in West Bank
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A home damaged during an attack by Israeli settlers on al-Mughayyir, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on Saturday.
An Israeli teenager whose disappearance had led to riots by Israeli settlers in the West Bank was found dead on Saturday, the Israeli authorities said, threatening to further inflame tensions in the Israeli-occupied territory.
Binyamin Achimair, 14, had left a farming settlement in the West Bank to herd sheep on Friday morning, but never returned, according to the Israeli police. The Israeli forces later found his corpse, and the military said, without providing evidence, that he had been “murdered in a terrorist attack.”
After Binyamin’s disappearance on Friday, armed Israeli settlers stormed a Palestinian village near Ramallah, torching several buildings and cars, according to Palestinian officials and Yesh Din, an Israeli rights group. One Palestinian man — Jihad Abu Aliya — was killed during the clashes and at least 25 others wounded, according to the village mayor, Amin Abu Aliya.
Binyamin’s death and the possibility of further Israeli reprisals could ratchet up violence in the West Bank, where roughly 500,000 Israeli settlers live alongside about 2.7 million Palestinians. Over 400 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces across the West Bank and East Jerusalem since the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7 sparked Israel’s campaign in Gaza, according to the United Nations.
The Biden administration has said Israel must do more to clamp down on violence by extremist Israeli settlers, and it has imposed sanctions on several whom it said were involved in attacks on Palestinians. Israeli leaders denounced that move as interference in the country’s internal affairs.
As Israeli troops and police officers searched for Binyamin on Friday afternoon, armed Israeli settlers burst into the Palestinian village of al-Mughayyir, setting buildings and cars on fire, said Mr. Abu Aliya. In video circulated by Yesh Din, smoke can be seen billowing from some burning cars and buildings.
In a statement, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel decried Binyamin’s “heinous murder” and vowed that Israel would “close accounts” with whomever killed him. He did not explicitly mention the riot, instead telling the Israeli public to “allow the security forces to conduct their work unmolested” as they investigate the killing.
The Israeli military confirmed that multiple “violent riots” had taken place in the area during the search efforts. At one point, “rocks were hurled” at Israeli soldiers, leading them to open fire in response, the Israeli military said. The Israeli police and soldiers had also removed Israeli settlers who had entered al-Mughayyir, the military said.
Israeli soldiers were in the area “even before the settlers arrived,” Mr. Abu Aliya said, but did not block them from entering the village and torching buildings and cars. It was not immediately clear how Jihad Abu Aliya, the village resident, was killed.Human rights groups have long charged that the Israeli authorities do not do enough to prevent violent attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians, and that the perpetrators are rarely arrested. An Israeli police spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment as to whether any Israelis had been arrested during the incident.
Last February, an attack by Israeli settlers devastated the Palestinian town of Huwara in the northern West Bank. At least one Palestinian was killed and 390 were wounded in the riot, according to Palestinian officials, in which Israelis burned a number of buildings and cars while terrified Palestinians fled burning homes.
— Aaron Boxerman reporting from Jerusalem
President Biden told reporters on Friday that he expected Iran to launch an attack on Israel “sooner than later” as a response to Israel’s killing of several top Iranian generals in a bombing in Syria two weeks ago.
Mr. Biden said he needed to be careful not to reveal classified information being collected by intelligence and military officials as they braced for an attack they believed was imminent. And he had a blunt, succinct answer when he was asked what his message to Iran was.
“Don’t,” he said.
Officials in the United States and other nations are engaged in a furious diplomatic effort to try to prevent a response from Iran that could spiral into a wider war. But Mr. Biden and his top aides have made it clear that their disagreement with Israel over the war in the Gaza Strip would not prevent the United States from defending Israel against attacks from other adversaries.
“We are devoted to the defense of Israel,” Mr. Biden told reporters at the White House after a speech to the National Action Network. “We will support Israel and help defend Israel, and Iran will not succeed.”
He did not specify what actions the United States might take.
John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said earlier on Friday that the administration was taking the threat of an attack seriously.
“We are certainly mindful of a very public — and what we consider to be a very credible — threat made by Iran in terms of potential attacks on Israel,” he said. “We are in constant communication with our Israeli counterparts about making sure that they can defend themselves against those kinds of attacks.”
Mr. Kirby said the U.S. military was making adjustments to its force deployments in the Middle East to be ready in case an attack occurred, but he declined to be specific about those changes.
“We’re also clearly — it would be imprudent if we didn’t — taking a look at our own posture in the region, to make sure that we’re more properly prepared as well,” he said.
Iran is expected to mount an attack soon on Israel, but not on the United States or its military forces, when Tehran retaliates for an Israeli bombing in Damascus, Syria, that killed several senior Iranian commanders, U.S. and Iranian officials said on Friday.
American intelligence analysts and officials think Iran will strike multiple targets inside Israel within the next few days, three U.S. officials said, speaking on anonymity to talk about sensitive matters they were not authorized to discuss publicly. Officials did not indicate what form the attack would take, what kinds of targets would be involved and the precise timing — information that is very closely guarded among senior Iranians.
The United States, Israel’s pre-eminent ally, has military forces in several places across the Middle East, but Iran likely will not target them to avoid inciting a direct conflict with the United States, according to Iranian officials, who similarly insisted on remaining anonymous, and the American officials.
In the first months of the war between Israel and Hamas, Iran-backed militias regularly attacked U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria and Jordan. But after a drone strike killed three Americans in Jordan in January, and the United States launched retaliatory strikes, Iran stopped the attacks by its proxies, fearing a more powerful U.S. response. Despite the clashes and hostile rhetoric, both Iranian and U.S. leaders have made it clear they want to avoid all-out war.
Iran has publicly and repeatedly vowed revenge for the April 1 strike on its embassy complex in Damascus that killed three generals and four other officers of its elite Quds Force, the foreign military and intelligence arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. But analysts say Iranian leaders want to calibrate their response so it is big enough to impress, at home and abroad, that Iran is not impotent in the face of conflict, but not so big that it spirals into a full-fledged war with Israel or draws an American attack.
How Israel would respond to an Iranian attack on its soil is unclear. The Israeli military “continues to monitor closely what is happening in Iran and different arenas,” Herzi Halevi, chief of the Israeli general staff, said in a statement on Friday. He added, “Our forces are prepared and ready at all times and for any scenario.”
A strategist for the Revolutionary Guards, one of the Iranian officials who spoke anonymously, said Iran wants to take advantage of the widening rift between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and President Biden over Israel’s conduct of the war against Hamas — and not unite them in hostility to Iran.
The Biden administration has not only criticized the level of death and destruction wrought by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, it has also voiced fears that increased clashes across Israel’s northern borders, primarily with Iranian proxies like Hezbollah, could escalate into a broader regional war.
Iran believes it can generate international support for a retaliatory strike by focusing attention on the attack against its embassy complex, a rare breach of the norms of war, and arguing that it was merely defending itself, the Iranian officials said.
International law generally treats embassies and consulates as being exempt from attack. But Israeli officials have argued that the building they destroyed was diplomatic only in name, and was used as a Revolutionary Guards base, as evidenced by the high-level commanders who were meeting there when they were killed.
Richard Pérez-Peña contributed reporting.
— Eric Schmitt and Farnaz Fassihi
Israeli forces were on high alert on Friday in anticipation of a retaliatory strike by Iran or its proxies, which analysts and officials warned could spur an Israeli reaction and potentially provoke a broader conflict in the region.
Iran is expected to launch an attack as soon as this weekend in retaliation for an April 1 airstrike, in which warplanes struck an Iranian Embassy building in Damascus, killing three generals and other commanders, U.S. and Iranian officials said on Friday.
Military analysts said neither Israel nor Iran appeared interested in provoking a full-blown war that could draw in the United States, but that a miscalculation about either side’s red lines could result in an escalation in hostilities.
An Iranian response was inevitable given the high profile of one of the generals killed in Syria, Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a top commander in Iran’s Quds Force, the analysts said.
“For every wise player, there comes a moment when the cost-benefit calculation shifts and all strategies are reset,” said Mahdi Mohammadi, the chief adviser to Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament. “For Iran, that moment was the attack in Damascus.”
Israel expects Iran to strike in a way that allows it to save face, but is measured enough to not arouse an even fiercer counterstrike, analysts say. The Iranians “don’t want a total war,” said Amos Gilead, a retired Israeli general. “So they might attack targets that would enable them to declare that they’ve achieved a great victory.”
Iran and Israel do not maintain any direct, formal channels of communication, making the chances for each side to misread the other’s intentions far greater, said Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli military intelligence officer.
American intelligence analysts and officials think Iran will strike multiple targets inside Israel within the next few days, said three U.S. officials who requested anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.
Where those strikes are aimed, from where they will be launched, who might carry them out and the damage they are expected to inflict remain secret to all but the highest levels of the Iranian government and military.
But Iran’s answer to those questions will determine the size and scope of Israel’s response, said Mr. Citrinowicz, a fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
The country’s leaders most likely hope to use their strike to restore some semblance of deterrence following the killing of General Zahedi in Syria, he said. (Israel has not publicly taken responsibility for that attack, but several Israeli officials confirmed the country’s involvement to The New York Times.)
Such an Iranian response, Mr. Citrinowicz said, could mean an attack from Iranian territory rather than through its proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq.
Israel has warned that an attack launched from inside Iran on targets inside Israel would be considered an escalation that required a reaction.
Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, said on Thursday such an attack would be “clear evidence of Iran’s intentions to escalate the Middle East and stop hiding behind the proxies.”
Last week, in anticipation of an Iranian strike, the Israeli military announced that additional reserve units had been called up to reinforce Israel’s air defense system and that combat soldiers expecting leave had been ordered to remain deployed.
Should Iran launch an attack from its own soil, said Mr. Citrinowicz, Israel’s air defenses would detect drones or cruise missiles long before they reached their targets, giving Israeli forces a chance to destroy them.
A more daunting scenario, he said, would be surface-to-surface ballistic missiles, which would arrive in a matter of minutes. Israel has developed some defenses — such as the Arrow system — to intercept longer-range missiles.
“If we manage to intercept most of what’s incoming, that would be excellent — it would moderate our need to respond offensively,” Mr. Citrinowicz said.
Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting."
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