Shin Bet says Silwan stabbing attack foiled

Israeli security forces foiled a plan to stab a security guard outside a Jewish home in the disputed East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan and arrested several suspects, the Shin Bet security service said Thursday.

A statement from the agency did not say when the attack was planned or when the arrests, which included a minor, took place.

According to the Shin Bet, two residents of the majority Arab neighborhood planned to stab a guard outside Beit Ovadiah building in the neighborhood, which abuts the Old City.

The main suspects in the case were named as Mahmad Nasser Ahmed Abbasi, a 21-year-old member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Murad Mahmad Odeh Kostiro, 20.

Abbasi confessed that he recruited a minor about a month ago to spy out the security arrangements at Beit Ovadia as he plotted a shooting attack against security guards there, according to the statement.

Abbasi later changed his planned method from shooting to stabbing. He hid the weapons he had chosen, a knife and an axe, in his home and in the home of his grandfather.

Abbasi also confessed to giving pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails of his own manufacture to terrorists to throw at Jewish homes in Silwan.

The Beit Ovadia building is located in an area known as Kfar Hashiloah, a part of Silwan where Yemenite Jews lived from the 1880s until they were forced out in 1938 amid anti-Jewish riots.

Jewish families have been moving into the buildings of Kfar Hashiloah under the auspices of Ateret Kohanim, a right-wing group that settles Jews in Arab areas of East Jerusalem.

Most Jewish homes in the area post armed Israeli guards out of fear of attack from Palestinians.

According to the Shin Bet, the suspects, who confessed to various acts of “homegrown terrorism,” provided information about dozens of other people in Silwan who over the past year were involved in rioting and a series of attacks in which they threw firebombs, firecrackers and stones at Border Police troops, police officers and civilians in the area.

Homegrown terrorism, or popular terror, are terms used by Israeli agencies to describe low-level Palestinian violence, such as rock-throwing.

One suspect who confessed to throwing stones at police officers and visitors to the Temple Mount throughout 2014 named several others from Silwan who threw stones at Jewish visitors to the cemetery on the Mount of Olives, the statement said.

The suspects will be indicted on serious security-related charges in the next several days, Shin Bet officials said.

They added that the arrests were part of routine preventive action that the Shin Bet is taking to cope with the increased threat of terrorism in Jerusalem.