Israel-Palestine Escalation Bears 'Unhappy Resemblance' to Days Before Second Intifada, CIA Director Says
CIA Director William Burns says he is 'quite concerned about the prospects for even greater fragility and even greater violence between Israelis and Palestinians' following unrest seen in recent weeks
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director William J. Burns warned Thursday that Israel appears to be on the brink of another intifada following his visit to the country just two weeks earlier.
Speaking at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, Burns said that he and his colleagues in the intelligence community are "concerned that lot of what we're seeing today has a very unhappy resemblance to some of those realities that we saw then," referring to his time as a U.S. diplomat during the time of the second intifada.
"In the conversations I had with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, I think it left me quite concerned about the prospects for even greater fragility and even greater violence between Israelis and Palestinians," the CIA director said, adding that the security agency aims to "work as closely as we can with both the Palestinian security services and the Israeli security services to prevent the kind explosions of violence that we've seen in recent weeks."
The second intifada erupted in September 2000, when then-Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City, sparking a four-year uprising which left around 1,000 Israelis and 3,000 Palestinians dead.
Burns' comments follow increased Israeli raids across Palestinian towns and cities that have already killed over 40 Palestinians in 2023, part of a growing trend over the last year of increasingly bold operations in West Bank city centers in broad daylight. Palestinian militancy across major cities, particularly Jenin and Nablus, has also been fueled by relatively unknown armed groups emerging as key players in planning attacks on Israelis and exchanging fire with raiding Israeli forces, notably the Lion's Den group based in Nablus. Confrontations have also extended to cities that have otherwise been labeled "quiet" by the security establishment, including the West Bank city of Jericho, where Israeli forces killed 5 Palestinians in an exchange of fire on Monday.
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