First, the good news. Speaking to soldiers and reporters at an Oct. 10 event marking the recent Jewish holiday of Sukkot, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said, “When the next campaign begins, and it doesn’t matter where it begins, in the north or the south, it will immediately become a two-front campaign. There is no longer a single front, and that is our basic assumption.” The northern front is Lebanon and Syria, and the southern front will open up from Gaza, he said.

Now, the bad news, which Liberman spared his visitors and the people of Israel: The next war could well include a third front. He might have forgotten that the previous war, in 2014, during which Israel launched Operation Protective Edge, started on Israel’s eastern flank, in the West Bank, following the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli youths. The Cabinet's decision Oct. 17 to link the resumption of the political process to disarming Hamas is a prescription to confrontation with the Palestinians

After 10 years of the cruel blockade of Gaza, the Israeli “segregation policy” differentiating the West Bank from Gaza has collapsed. Gaza remains part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict equation, and its 2 million residents still comprise part of the demographic balance in the territories Israel controls. The reconciliation agreement signed Oct. 12 in Cairo by Hamas, which has ruled Gaza, and Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority (PA), tightens the official affinity between the West Bank and Gaza, strengthening solidarity between them.

A flare-up on Israel’s southern border with Gaza should thus be expected to spark a clash between Palestinians and Israeli settlers in the West Bank and incite Palestinian terror attacks in Israel, and vice versa. Security cooperation between Israel and the PA, already hanging by a thread, is unlikely to survive the next barrage of Israeli aerial attacks in Gaza and photos of bleeding Palestinian children.