Mourners attend the funeral of Palestinian Islamic Jihad commander Ali Ghali and his brother Mahmoud after they were killed in an Israeli strike on Gaza. Photo: Reuters/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa

Leaders from the so-called “axis of resistance” — an Iran-led, anti-Western network of countries and non-state actors that span the Middle East — met in Beirut over the weekend as members of the alliance try to foment terror attacks in the West Bank.

According to Iranian media, Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian on Friday conveyed a message to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), both widely designated as Palestinian terrorist groups, that his country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is committed to supporting their efforts in the West Bank. 

On Saturday, PIJ Secretary-General Ziyad al-Nakhala and Hamas deputy politburo chief Saleh al-Arouri met with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and issued a joint statement stressing their unity and coordination in confronting Israel.

“The firm position of all the forces of the axis of resistance in confronting the Zionist enemy, its occupation, and its arrogance was emphasized,” the statement said.

Several countries have designated Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon and Iran’s chief proxy force, as a terrorist organization.

The meetings came as Israel has faced a wave of violence emanating from the West Bank that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said is being “encouraged, directed, and financed by Iran and its proxies.”

On Thursday, an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier was killed in a Palestinian car ramming attack near Jerusalem. Meanwhile, three IDF troops were injured by an improvised explosive device in Nablus one day earlier.

The scale and sophistication of weapons seized by the IDF in recent months in counter-terror operations in the West Bank has raised the specter that Iran is ramping up its backing of PIJ, Hamas, and smaller Palestinian militant factions in a power play to destabilize the Palestinian Authority and carry out terrorist attacks against Israelis.

These militant groups have also increasingly demonstrated an ability to coordinate between Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank — all meant to be fronts against Israel. In April, for example, a Hamas cell in Lebanon fired dozens of rockets into Israel in response to a large Israeli counter-terrorism operation in the West Bank city of Jenin. The salvo was the largest such attack from Lebanon since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. While Israel exclusively blamed a Lebanon-based contingent of Hamas for the rocket fire, an IDF spokesman said the Israeli military believed Hezbollah was also aware of the attack.

Israel and Hezbollah have also traded increasingly provocative threats, with both sides threatening to bomb the other into the “Stone Age” in the event of conflict. Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations recently described tensions along Israel’s northern border as a “powder keg.”

On Monday, Nasrallah said he would allow Palestinian groups to launch rockets into Israel if Israel were to carry out a targeted assassination of any Palestinian leaders on Lebanese soil.

The latest threat was an apparent response to Netanyahu’s statement at an Israeli cabinet meeting last month saying that just because some Hamas leaders were hiding in Lebanon would not deter Israel from hunting them down.

“Hamas, and the other Iranian proxies, understand very well that we will fight with all means against their attempts to use terrorism against us — in [the West Bank], Gaza, and everywhere else,” he said. “Whoever tries to hurt us, whoever finances and organizes, whoever dispatches terrorists against Israel will pay the full price.”