Security forces foil plot by Arab Israeli to carry out Jerusalem Old City shooting attack
Uday Mobarsham. 24, said to have consumed Hamas, ISIS content online; suspect bought rifle, began training; Shin Bet says thwarted attack could have caused ‘dangerous escalation’
Israel police and Shin Bet agents foiled a plot by an Arab Israeli to carry out a shooting terror attack in the Old City of Jerusalem during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, it was announced Sunday.
The suspect, identified as 24-year-old Uday Mobarsham, a resident of the village of Makr in the north, was detained in February after he purchased a homemade rifle and began training with it.
During his interrogation, he said he planned to open fire on police officers or Jewish Israelis near the Old City’s Damascus Gate.
The Haifa District Attorney’s Office filed an indictment against Mobarsham, charging him with security offenses. He is currently in detention.
Per the indictment, the would-be attacker underwent a religious revival in 2022, in which he became engrossed with Salafist ideology and started consuming Hamas and ISIS-related content online.
Mobarsham began seriously considering carrying out a terror attack after the Hamas-led onslaught on October 7, 2023, expressing his desire to do so in writing. “Ramadan is coming, brother. The war is at the door,” he apparently wrote to his friend in February 2024, a year prior to his arrest.
Before police arrested him on February 11, Mobarsham passed his gun along to his brother, Adham, telling him to hide it somewhere far from their family home.
Police found the gun in Adham’s possession and arrested him also. The main suspect apparently tried to recruit several others in his terror plot, whom police also detained for questioning.
Prosecutors charged Mobarsham’s brother with possessing an illegal weapon, a criminal offense, on Friday.
“Foiling this attack was significant, given that we assess that if his plan had been carried out during Ramadan it could have undermined the quiet and led to a dangerous escalation in the Jerusalem area during a period of high security tensions,” a Shin Bet source said.
Police have kept Jerusalem’s Old City under tight watch during Ramadan, especially in light of tensions surrounding the Gaza war.
The site is the holiest place in Judaism, where two biblical Temples once stood, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque is the third-holiest shrine in Islam, making the site a perennial flashpoint of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Ahead of Ramadan in February, the Hamas terror group called on Palestinian Muslims in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as Arab Israelis, to travel to the Temple Mount in large numbers and oppose what it said were attempts by Israel to “desecrate and control” the site using “any means.”
The Times of Israel Community.