The PA says it has arrested a terrorist planning a suicide attack in Israel.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
The Palestinian Authority (PA) arrested a young woman two weeks ago due to her alleged plan to commit a suicide attack in Israel on behalf of ISIS, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Sunday.
When 23-year-old Ala’ Bashir, a Koran teacher from a village near Kalkilya, was taken into custody, it caused an immediate uproar on social media. Calls for her release came from various Palestinian factions and the Arab public.
According to the Israeli daily, this led the normally secretive Palestinian Preventive Security Service (PSS) to make the unusual move of announcing the reason for the arrest – to forestall an act that would “destabilize the region.”
A senior Palestinian source told the paper that Bashir had been recruited to the extremist Islamic terrorist organization ISIS, and was planning to blow herself up somewhere in Israel to cause mass casualties.
Bashir had admitted to investigators that she had made contact with ISIS members in Syria and Gaza through the Telegram messaging app, the source said. They sent her back instruction booklets on how to construct large explosive devices. She answered that she was willing to carry out a bombing using an explosive belt.
The source added that the young woman had identified with Al Qaeda in the past, and suffered from extreme social issues as well. This was why she had decided to commit suicide while murdering Jews at the same time.
Bashir is the niece of an officer in the PA’s intelligence service, said the report. However, this did not stop 25 officers from raiding the Othman Bin Affan mosque in her hometown while she was in the middle of teaching the Koran to a group of children.
Last week, The Jerusalem Post reported that the PSS said she was arrested after information had come to their attention that “certain parties operating outside the national consensus, and which had contributed to the destabilization of surrounding Arab countries, had exploited her difficult psychological and social condition.”
In the report, Bashir’s mother complained that her daughter was being held in solitary confinement and no family or lawyers were being allowed to see her.