Ahmed Jabbis, 21, and Basel Abidat, 19, were arrested in late October in an East Jerusalem raid only recently publicized by Israeli Police.
“On the night of October 28, 2019, dozens of Border Police officers raided two houses simultaneously in the village of Jebel Mukaber,” an undercover border police officer who oversaw the operation said in a police statement accompanying the release of footage of the raid, as quoted by the Jerusalem Post. "This was a planned operation, we had information about the location of the accused, and as soon as conditions allowed, we detained them.”
📽️: Israel Border Police arrest two #Palestinian ISIS terrorists who planned to carry out a shooting and stabbing attack in #Jerusalem on Independence Day.@israelpolice pic.twitter.com/oyoJKzaASb
— Israel News Feed (@IsraelHatzolah) December 4, 2019
According to the indictment, the two were active on Daesh-linked websites as early as 2016, where they gained access to terrorist tactics and skills like bomb-making, and Abidat had tried to join Daesh forces operating in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, but was blocked from crossing the Egypt-Jordan border by Jordanian border guards.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP on Wednesday that Jabbis and Abidat had been charged on Sunday with membership in Daesh and with plotting a massacre using either firearms or knives in Jerusalem in late April, when Israelis celebrate the country’s declaration of independence from Britain.
"The accused discussed the possibility of carrying out murderous terror attacks at various sites in the city of Jerusalem or at army bases in the Jordan Valley area with the aim of killing as many Jews as possible in the name of IS [Daesh]," according to a police statement.
In June 2017, Daesh attempted to claim responsibility for several coordinated attacks in Jerusalem’s Old City that killed a female police officer, but Israeli Police denied the group responsible was part of Daesh, saying it was a “a local cell that wasn't linked to any organization," Sputnik reported at the time.
