Police officers and Shin Bet agents arrested a father and his son along with another man suspected of plotting several terror attacks, including a nightclub shooting and the murder of an Israeli Air Force pilot, law enforcement officials said Sunday.
They were arrested in late June. All three are residents of East Jerusalem.
The foiled terror plots represent “one of the gravest and most complex incidents to occur recently in the Jerusalem District,” said police Superintendent Nadav Kogen in a statement announcing the arrests.
According to Hebrew reports on the investigation, the father is an Arab Muslim who married and fathered a son with a Jewish woman, from whom he later separated. Jewish by virtue of his mother, the son converted to Islam after failing to qualify for a combat role in the IDF.
After his rejection, his father reportedly persuaded him to join him and take up terrorism, teaching him how to shoot from the roof of their home in Kafr Aqab.
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The two also manufactured explosives in apartment units they used as bombmaking laboratories, which have since been raided by the police.
An aerial view shows the Jerusalem neighborhood of Kafr Aqab near the West Bank city of Ramallah, on August 29, 2022. (Ahmad Gharabli/AFP)
The joint police-Shin Bet investigation was opened after the father reached out to an undercover cop, nicknamed “Matrix,” with an offer to sell him explosives intended for terror attacks.
The two were arrested by the Jerusalem District police investigations and intelligence unit. Officers seized bombmaking materials, ammunition and ready-to-use pipe bombs in the apartment raids.
The third suspect, a young man in his 20s, was arrested on suspicion of preparing explosives with the father and hiding them in his home. He also planned to attack security forces, according to police.
The suspects, all currently in custody, planned to stage a bombing attack targeting soldiers and police at a checkpoint in northern Jerusalem.
The son, who worked as a cook in a retirement home in central Israel, also planned to go out on his own and shoot up a nightclub in the region with a firearm he had in his possession, but never followed through with the idea.
Police said that he also sought, alongside his father, to kill a pilot who served in the Israeli Air Force.
The father, law enforcement added, had fired several rounds near the West Bank security barrier in 2023, a few months before Hamas’s October 7 attack and outbreak of the Gaza war. He fled the scene before soldiers could catch him.
A police investigator involved in the case told the Ynet news outlet that the probe is “one of the most serious cases we’ve handled in the unit,” saying the arrest of the three suspects prevented a mass casualty attack.
A prosecutor’s declaration was filed against the three suspects on Sunday afternoon. Police said they will be charged with security offenses later this week.
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