Bibi: Israel Stopped 50 ISIS Attacks

Stand for Israel  |  June 26, 2019

This week, the strong bond between the United States and Israel has been on display in many ways. One of them came at a Tel Aviv cyber conference at which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke. The Jerusalem Post’s Yonah Jeremy Bob reports that PM Netanyahu hailed the strong U.S.-Israel relationship with having helped thwart fifty attacks by the Islamic State (ISIS) terror group:

Israel has used its cyber intelligence capabilities to thwart around 50 ISIS terrorist attacks in dozens of countries worldwide, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the Cyber Week conference at Tel Aviv University on Wednesday.

While Israel previously disclosed that it had provided the intelligence to thwart an ISIS plot to bomb a United Arab Emirates Etihad Airways flight from Sydney to Abu Dhabi, Netanyahu revealed that the intelligence that broke the case was obtained through cyber tools.

He said that while he could not give specifics, the audience could “multiply by about 50” the Sydney airline terrorist plot, and that would be the number of terrorist plots worldwide (mostly by ISIS) that Israel has helped to prevent thanks to its cyber intelligence powers.

“The plane from Sydney to Abu Dhabi was not going to be hijacked but exploded in midair,” he said. “We used our cyber tools to discover that ISIS was going to do this, and so we alerted the Australian police and they stopped it before it could happen.

“This particular incident I can talk about because it was leaked to the media,” Netanyahu said. “If you multiply that by 50, it will give you an idea of the contribution that Israel has made to prevent major terrorist operations, especially from ISIS, in dozens of countries. Most of those cases were foiled because of our cybersecurity operations…”