Iran and Palestinian terror groups want to exploit Israel’s internal divisions, says Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar said that Israeli forces have prevented more than 300 ‘significant’ Palestinian terror attacks thus far in 2022, while outlining the major current areas of security concern at a conference on Sunday.
“We foiled 312 significant terrorist attacks, stabbings, shootings, suicide attacks, and have made 2,110 arrests” since January, Bar said at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism conference at Reichman University in Herzliya.
The number of incidents in Judea and Samaria against both soldiers and civilians involving hot weapons has especially increased over the last three years, he noted. While there were only 19 such attacks in 2020, the number quintupled to 98 last year, and has jumped even more in 2022, with 130 shootings already recorded.
The IDF has absorbed much of this while battling terrorists on its almost nightly arrest raids in Palestinian villages and cities. The crackdown is part of Israel’s ongoing g Operation Break the Wave, which began after a series of Palestinian terror attacks killed 17 Israelis and two foreign nationals in March-May.
A number of other terror attacks were thwarted during that time.
Bar described Breaking the Wave as providing a “protective blanket” for Israeli citizens. However, Palestinian resistance to the IDF’s incursions has stiffened.
He also stressed that the number of attacks on civilians has risen in part due to divisions in Israeli society.
“We can say today without a shadow of a doubt, the political instability, the growing internal division… are an encouragement to the axis of evil, to the terror organizations and individual attackers,” he said, making an urgent call for Israeli society to rebuild its social cohesion.
It is also no secret that Hamas would like to overthrow the PA in Judea and Samaria just as it did in the Gaza Strip in 2007, and it is constantly encouraging Palestinian violence against Israel.
Senior security officials told Walla! News earlier this month that both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) have been pouring money into the region to buy weapons, reward attackers and recruit new members. successful.
Both terrorist organizations depend on Iranian funding, with PIJ being a directly controlled proxy of the regime in Tehran.
Israel’s internal security agency chief also touched on Islamic republic, saying, “Iran is the origin of most of the [terror] phenomena in the region and it also has a significant part in the instability we are experiencing in the Palestinian arena…. [It] isn’t just a nuclear problem, it is the underlying problem of the Middle East.”
“We can only dream of the level of terror” the mullahs will engender if the nuclear deal is re-signed and Tehran will get access to billions of dollars a year as sanctions are removed, he added.
While Bar talked of the success Israeli security forces have had against major terrorist attacks, according to the government’s official statistics, through July there have been 1,318 Palestinian nationalistic acts of violence, with the vast majority occurring in Judea and Samaria.
Over 800 of them were fire-bombings, which includes Molotov cocktails being thrown at civilian cars as well as troops. These particular statistics did not mention the thousands of stone-throwing incidents that have occurred this year as in others, making travel on the roads of Judea and Samaria a dangerous proposition for its Jewish residents.