The Shadow Army At Israel's Doorstep - One Surprise Attack Away From Disaster

A new investigative report by the Regavim Movement is sounding an alarm that many in Israel and abroad may not be prepared to hear: the Palestinian Authority Security Forces (PASF) may no longer be merely a civilian policing body, but a growing armed force capable of posing a strategic threat to the Jewish state.

According to the March 24 report, The Writing is on the Wall (of Jericho), the Palestinian Authority is developing what Regavim describes as a "terror army in the heart of the state," one that could one day launch a surprise attack on Israel on a scale that could eclipse the horrors of Oct. 7, 2023.

"At any moment, the Palestinian Authority Security Forces may mobilize against us, and the events of Oct. 7 will seem like a walk in the park in comparison," Naomi Linder Kahn, director of the International Division of Regavim, told JNS on Tuesday.

According to the report, the PASF has evolved far beyond its intended role under the 1995 Oslo II framework, which originally capped its size at 30,000 personnel equipped primarily with light arms for internal law enforcement and policing duties.

Regavim alleges that the force now numbers approximately 65,000 combat-trained personnel, including individuals with prior terror convictions, and possesses weaponry far more suited to offensive military operations than routine public security. That includes grenade launchers, machine guns, armored vehicles, and armor-piercing munitions.

The report also claims that Palestinian Authority personnel have received advanced military training abroad, including officer and command instruction in Russia; armored, tank, and artillery training in Pakistan; and tactical parachuting training in Egypt and Italy.

According to Regavim, training facilities in Jordan and Jericho--often publicly described as centers for civilian policing--have hosted exercises involving live-fire attacks from high-speed all-terrain motorcycles, urban warfare drills, breaching operations using explosives, and coordinated combat maneuvers. Those are not the normal tools of a neighborhood police force. Those are the skills of a force preparing for war.

And that is where this story becomes even more disturbing.

Because the true danger is not just that the Palestinian Authority may be developing the capability to strike. It is that much of the international community still insists on pretending the PA represents a fundamentally different long-term threat than Hamas.

That assumption is becoming harder and harder to defend.

Hamas has always been the openly declared enemy -- the one that broadcasts its intentions, glorifies bloodshed, and eventually acts on it in the most barbaric ways imaginable. The Palestinian Authority, by contrast, has often been marketed to the world as the "responsible" Palestinian partner, the supposedly more moderate governing alternative, the one foreign governments can fund and diplomatically shield in the hope that it will preserve stability.

But if the findings in this report are even partly accurate, that distinction may be less meaningful than many want to believe.

The difference may not be one of ultimate worldview, but of timing.

Hamas attacked when it believed the moment had arrived. The Palestinian Authority may simply be biding its time -- building, training, embedding, and waiting for the right conditions.

That is what makes this so dangerous. One enemy is obvious. The other may be institutional.

One of the clearest examples that the underlying problem has never truly gone away is the Palestinian Authority's long-running "pay-to-slay" system. Though the PA has repeatedly tried to rebrand or obscure the program under international pressure, watchdogs and legal challenges have continued to point to large-scale payments being funneled to imprisoned terrorists and the families of those killed while carrying out attacks. 

Reports in 2025 and early 2026 said the system still amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars annually, with one recent legal claim putting the figure around $300 million in a single year. Even after official promises of reform, U.S. and media reporting said substantial payouts continued through alternative channels.

That matters because it reveals something far deeper than a budgeting controversy. It reveals a moral and strategic culture that still rewards terror.

You cannot tell a generation that "martyrdom" brings honor, salary, and status, and then expect the surrounding society to remain truly demilitarized. You cannot continue subsidizing the families of killers and then insist the governing structure doing so is committed to peaceful coexistence. Whatever language diplomats use in press conferences, money tells the truth.

And the money has been telling the truth for years.

Just as troubling is the broader ideological environment in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority. For years, many outside observers comforted themselves with the assumption that while Gaza was radicalized under Hamas, the West Bank would remain comparatively restrained and politically manageable. But the polling tells a far more ominous story.

Survey data published by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in 2025 found that support for Hamas's Oct. 7 attack remained at majority levels overall, with 59% support in the West Bank in its October 2025 findings, while opposition to Hamas being disarmed remained especially strong there. Other polling throughout 2024 and 2025 repeatedly showed deep support for "armed struggle" and persistent hostility toward any framework that would actually dismantle the terror infrastructure.

That should shatter one of the most dangerous illusions in this conflict.

The worldview that produced Hamas is not neatly contained inside Hamas territory.

It exists in the West Bank too.

And if a population increasingly shaped by those views is being governed by an authority that still rewards terrorism, while simultaneously maintaining tens of thousands of armed and specially trained personnel positioned within striking distance of Israel's civilian heartland, then this is not merely a problem of "instability." It is the architecture of a future catastrophe.

This is what a time bomb looks like before it explodes.

It does not always wear a black headband and shout threats into a camera. Sometimes it wears a uniform, receives foreign aid, attends diplomatic meetings, and speaks the language of governance while preserving the incentives, training, and ideological oxygen that keep terror alive under the surface.

That is what makes the Regavim warning so chilling.

If Israel ever faces a coordinated betrayal from within Judea and Samaria--whether through direct PASF mobilization, mass defections, insider facilitation, weapons diversion, or simultaneous uprisings tied to a broader regional war--the consequences could be staggering. Israel's central population centers are within immediate reach. Major roads, communities, and vulnerable chokepoints sit far closer to these areas than many outside the region fully appreciate. The result would not simply be another terror wave. It could become a full-spectrum internal assault.

And if that day ever comes, the failure will not belong only to those who planned it.

It will also belong to those who refused to see it coming.

Israel has already learned in the bloodiest possible way what happens when declared enemies are underestimated, their training dismissed, and their intentions rationalized away. Oct. 7 shattered the myth that visible warning signs can safely be ignored.

The far more sobering possibility raised by this report is that the next threat may not come from the enemy that shouts the loudest.

It may come from the one that has been preparing quietly, patiently, and in plain sight.

"Every inch of the State of Israel is in danger, and we demand that the State of Israel act swiftly and decisively to prevent the nightmare scenario for which the Palestinian Authority has been training its troops for decades," Kahn said.