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The past year has seen a significant acceleration in attempts to act against Israeli and Jewish targets in the world, Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) chief Yoram Cohen said Wednesday, while addressing the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense committee.
Cohen accused Iran of being the central actor behind the worldwide terror plots, "most of which were not publicized." He stated that the Shin Bet, Mossad and IDF had been successful in gleaning enough intelligence about the terror plots and infrastructure to stymie their operations.
The Shin Bet chief said that Iranian agents had also entered the Gaza Strip, imparting knowledge to local terrorists. Cohen referred to Gaza as a "giant arms warehouse," with Hamas possessing some 8,000 rockets with a range of four to forty kilometers. Cohen added that Hamas has some 15,000 fighters and the Islamic Jihad has an additional 5,000 fighters.
Cohen referred to Libya as a "new gate to hell," saying that large numbers of shoulder-launched missiles and rockets from the country were flooding the market and being smuggled from the country into Gaza. He added that the Shin Bet has "hundreds of quality targets" in Gaza, based on "quality intel" and is ready to attack from air or land when given the command.
The Shin Bet chief also spoke about terrorists using Egypt\’s Sinai as a launching ground for attacks against Israel and the importance of cooperation between Jerusalem and Cairo in ridding the peninsula of terror. "Without Egyptians taking care of it, we will have a very complex problem," he said.
Cohen also warned of the terror threat emanating from the West Bank. He stated that Hamas was the dominant terrorist organization in the territory. According to Cohen, Israel thwarted 28 planned kidnappings by West Bank terrorists in the last year, 18 of them connected to Hamas.
The Shin Bet chief said that while the Palestinian Authority worked to stop terror attacks when alerted of plots by Israel, they did not always arrest or put terrorists on trial. While PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad do not support violence, their choice not to partake in peace talks with Israel harmed the standing of the PA, according to Cohen. He stated that the Israeli decision to return 100 bodies of Palestinian terrorists to the PA was a "faith-building step."