The Shin Bet and Israel Police said Thursday they had foiled a plot to carry out a ramming attack against Israeli soldiers last month.
Jihad Zureiqat, a resident of the northern Arab Israeli town of Kafr Kanna, was arrested in February on suspicion of committing security offenses, the agencies said in a joint statement.
They said the suspect, who allegedly identifies with the Hamas terror group, began to plan and intended to carry out a car-ramming attack against soldiers “following violent incidents.”
Police said an investigation turned up last testaments written by Zureiqat as well as “nationalist materials,” including Hamas instructional booklets on how to carry out terror attacks.
Prosecutors in the State Attorney’s Office later filed an indictment against the suspect on charges of planning to carry out a terror act.
According to the charge sheet, Zureiqat began to embrace Hamas ideology in 2022, seeing Jews as “infidels” who deserve to die, and the State of Israel as a foreign entity that should be destroyed.
Books and Palestinian and Hamas flags that police say were discovered during an investigation of a Kafr Kanna resident suspected of plotting a ramming attack, published on March 20, 2025. (Israel Police)
Prosecutors say he read material by Hamas activities that encouraged terror attacks and watched videos on bomb-making.
He also perused content dealing with jihad and dying as a martyr, eventually deciding to carry out an attack on security forces in the area of the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
In one of the testaments that he wrote, typed out on his cellphone between April 2022 and October 2023, Zureiqat extolled dying as part of the war against Israel and its citizens, citing Hamas’s military wing.
Following the start of the war against Hamas in Gaza in October 2023, his desire to die as a martyr intensified, and in January last year he wrote another will, by hand, in which he referred to himself as a “living martyr.”
In April last year, he tried to carry out a car-ramming against IDF soldiers close to the Golani Junction in the north of the country, but although he momentarily accelerated toward a bus stop where troops were standing, a passing vehicle prevented him from carrying out the attack, according to the indictment.
The revelation of Zureiqat’s plan came after police and the Shin Bet said on Sunday they had thwarted another plot by an Arab Israeli to carry out a shooting attack in the Old City of Jerusalem during the ongoing Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
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.
Israeli security forces stand guard outside Damascus Gate at the entrance of Jerusalem’s Old City, ahead of the first Ramadan Friday noon prayer at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound on the Temple Mount on March 7, 2025. (Photo by AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP)
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 location a perennial flashpoint of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Ahead of the start 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.
Ramadan ends on Saturday, March 29.
The Gaza war started on October 7, 2023, when the Palestinian terror group Hamas led over 5,000 attackers to invade southern Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting 251 who were taken as hostages to the Gaza Strip. A fragile ceasefire reached in January collapsed this week as fighting resumed.
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