Israel will bypass some of its Arab towns in transporting ground forces to future war fronts, a senior army general said on Friday, citing lessons from sectarian violence that erupted in the country in May during clashes in the Gaza Strip.
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Arabs, most of them Muslim, constitute a fifth of Israel's population. Many identify as Palestinian. Some mounted protests against the Gaza campaign that spiraled into riots.
Major-General Yitzhak Turgeman, chief of logistics for the Israel Defense Forces, said it had since marked out 1,600 km (1,000 miles) of dirt tracks that could serve as wartime alternatives to roads and set up new anti-riot units to protect convoys.
"I'm really concerned about ... the impact of violent disturbances on internal security and movement of transport convoys," Turgeman told the Maariv newspaper in an interview.
He said major deployments were now unlikely to happen through Wadi Ara, a valley highway among close clusters of Arab towns that leads to the northern fronts with Lebanon and Syria.
"In wartime, the IDF will do what is right in order to bring its units to the war theater as quickly as possible, and we have enough alternatives," Turgeman said.
The remarks came after video clips on social media showed army vehicles wending through Umm al-Fahm, an Arab-majority city, during a drill. The municipality issued an open letter condemning the presence as "unacceptable and hurtful to residents' feelings".
Public Security Minister Omer Barlev described police operations to seize illegal firearms in Israeli Arab communities as a further safeguard for future military deployments.
In the absence of such actions, a war could see "100 armed (Israeli) Arabs suddenly go down to this or that road or artery and hold up for 48 hours a division that has to deploy on the Lebanese border within 24 hours," Barlev told Army Radio last month.
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