Israel’s Shin Bet security agency said on Wednesday that it thwarted an Iranian operation to move a large cache of advanced weaponry into the occupied West Bank for planned attacks on Israeli targets.
The haul contained dozens of explosive devices, drones, anti-tank weapons, grenades, handguns, rifles, machine guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, according to the security agency. Similar smuggling attempts were blocked in March and November last year, it said.
The investigation began months ago after Israel’s military arrested a weapons dealer near the Ramallah area of the West Bank.
His questioning led Shin Bet investigators to a wider network of smugglers and eventually to the shipment.
Shin Bet said Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was behind the operation through its Unit 400, led by Jawad Ghafari, and Unit 18840 in Syria, which it said reports to Asghar Bakri, the head of the covert Unit 840.
Two IRGC operatives, Salah al-Husseini and Muhammad Shuayb, who were killed in Israeli strikes in Lebanon in July, were also allegedly involved in the smuggling network.
The agency said the plot was part of a broader Iranian strategy to supply armed groups in the West Bank with weapons to carry out attacks on Israeli civilians and military personnel.
Iran and its armed allies in the region have suffered punishing Israeli blows over the course of a two-year war regional conflict sparked by a Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 which killed 1,200 Israelis and abducted 251.
Tehran-backed Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants mostly based in Gaza have been worn down by a devastating Israeli incursion into the coastal enclave which local health officials say killed at least 67,000 people.
The groups have a smaller presence in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since a 1967 Mideast war, and have faced off with Israeli forces in sporadic clashes.
