DHS, FBI, TSA and the CIA need to follow the lead of Shin Bet.
Via Jerusalem Post
The Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) thwarted an attempt by a Hamas-affiliated group to set up a terrorist cell in the West Bank for the purpose of kidnapping Israelis, security forces announced on Wednesday. The terror plot was directed by Palestinian security prisoners in Israeli prisons, the Shin Bet added.
“Those involved were in their first stages of planning the attack,” the Shin Bet said in a statement.
The domestic intelligence service named Muhammad Bel, 24, of Zeitoun in Gaza, doing time in the Eshel prison since 2008, as a suspect who recruited two Palestinian prisoners from the West Bank for the plot.
The recruits have been named as Ali Harub, 21, of Dora, near Hebron, serving a sentence for being a member of a military terrorist cell, planning attacks, and manufacturing bombs and Molotov cocktails, and Rajab Salah Al-din, 53, of Hamza, near Ramallah, a former member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in prison since May 2012 for three failed kidnapping attempts.
The three suspects confessed to the plot during questioning, the Shin Bet stated, and were charged in late December with terrorist offensives as the Beersheba District Court.
The investigation revealed that the highest levels of the Kataib Al-Mujahadin (Holy Warriors Brigades) terror group were involved in the planning stages of the attacks. Bel was in touch with a liaison in Gaza, named as Amar Khalil Kassam, 29, who is in charge of dealing with prisoners and who answers directly to the head of the organization.
A security source told The Jerusalem Post that the point of the plot was to enable a Gaza-based terror group to gain operatives from the West Bank, who could then use their own contacts outside of prison to organize a kidnapping.
“The Holy Warriors Brigade is a terror group that splintered off from the Fatah Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and adopted extremist Islamic characteristics,” the Shin Bet said.
It is headed by Asad Abu Sharia, 36, a resident of Gaza and terror operative, who took over the group in 2007 after his brother, Omar Abu Sharia, the former leader, was killed in an IAF strike in Gaza in 2006.
The group is in close touch with Hamas in Gaza, and has been involved in recent years in rocket attacks on Israel, shootings against the IDF, and setting off bombs on the Gaza – Israel border, among other activities.
Cooperation with Hamas includes cooperation, training, and assistance, as well as financial support and weapons transfers for attacks, and the smuggling of arms to Gaza.