Israel was bracing for a period of high tension as Ramadan and Passover, the Jewish Passover, approach in a few days. But in less than a week, the country was hit by two terrorist attacks ahead of these meetings. Sunday, March 27, two men dressed in white opened fire with automatic weapons in the evening in Hadera, a city located between Tel Aviv and Haifa. Two members of the border police’s counter-terrorism units present by chance in a restaurant near the scene of the assault neutralized them in less than two minutes. But two police officers – including a Franco-Israeli native of Marseilles – were killed and five people injured.
The attack could have been even more deadly given the arsenal available to the attackers: at least three automatic weapons, six knives, tactical vests and more than a thousand ammunition.
A failure of the intelligence services
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement released Monday, March 28 on a propaganda site. The assailants were Israeli Arabs, cousins and natives of Umm Al-Fahm, about twenty kilometers from Hadera, in northern Israel. Of the five suspects arrested on Monday, three live in this city considered the capital of the “Arab triangle”.
→ REREAD. Israel: Knife attack leaves at least three dead
This is the second attack in less than a week linked to the Islamic State (IS). On Tuesday, March 22, a Bedouin killed four Israelis in a stabbing and ramming attack in Beersheba, Negev. The author, a Daesh sympathizer, was sentenced in 2016 to four years in prison for planning to travel to Syria to fight for IS. If this affair is presented as the act of a “lone wolf”, voices have been rising since the attack on Hadera to question the flaws in Shin Bet intelligence and the police. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told security forces to adapt “quickly to the new threat”.
Until now, the attacks perpetrated against the Israeli security forces, which take place sporadically, were rather the work of Palestinians with no connection to the IS. “As Ramadan approached, Passover, the security and intelligence apparatus was no doubt focused on Palestinian nationalism, and the risk of attacks in the West Bank or Jerusalem, and not on a transnational threat, because it is a very minor phenomenon », says David Khalfa, associate researcher at the Observatory of North Africa and the Middle East of the Jean-Jaurès Foundation.
A cell and a whole arsenal
In 2017, the Meir Amit Intelligence and Information Center think tank listed some sixty Israeli citizens who had left for Syria, most of them joining IS. The first deadly attack inspired by the Islamic State in the country dates back to 1is January 2016 when an Israeli Arab opened fire on terraces in Tel Aviv, killing two people. Since then, the Jewish state has been relatively spared by the jihadist group.
→ REREAD. Israeli police ‘neutralize’ Palestinian who stabbed Israeli
“The two attacks in Beersheba and Hadera are part of local Islamist terrorism. They were perpetrated by radicalized Israeli Arabs living near the two affected towns and benefiting from easy movement and access to the targeted sites. But while the first is “low cost”, the second is more sophisticated, and relies on the existence of a cell and a whole arsenal of offensive weapons. The claim is not nationalist, linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but jihadist because these attacks were committed in the name of Daesh, help David Khalfa.We will have to see whether or not we are on the verge of a wave, with the desire of the Islamic State to redirect part of its actions towards Israel and its Arab allies. »
In the middle of an unprecedented summit in the Negev
The timing of the Hadera attack questions, in the midst of an unprecedented summit in the Negev between the United States, Israel, Egypt, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. A concomitance noted by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas which hailed “the heroic operation of Hadera”, “carried out in response to the normalization summit on our land”.
“ISIS probably wants to send a message to the powers allied with Israel, adds the researcher. But it is a failure from this point of view for the attackers, insofar as the ministers of the four Arab countries strongly condemned this attack and seized on it to underline the need to strengthen the regional fight against religious extremism. and terrorism. »