Fail2Ban Question: Can I do this without restarting the service?

[cyaiplexys <cyaiplexys@sitesplace.net>]

I have a list of IP addresses I want to ban and I put them in 
/etc/fail2ban/action.d/iptables-multiport.conf as so:

cat /etc/fail2ban/ip.blacklist.perm | while read IP; do iptables -I 
fail2ban-<name> 1 -s $IP -j DROP; done

(that was supposed to be all on one line, of course)

So, I have read that when you do things this way, you MUST restart 
fail2ban (sudo service fail2ban restart).

Is there a better way to do this? I have a cron job that gathers IP 
addresses that get more than 1,000 hits from the apache log file and 
that gets put in the ip.blacklist.perm file.

I know *nothing* about fail2ban. I just read of this technique via 
Google. But when using Google, I can't find another way to do this that 
doesn't require a restart of the service.

Any ideas on other ways to do this?