Director of MEMRI Terror Monitor: This video should be taken seriously, but needs to be put into proportion.
By ARIEL BEN SOLOMONUpdated: NOVEMBER 12, 2015 02:25ISIS militants threaten Israel in propaganda video
Islamic State released a new video Tuesday threatening to attack Israel, but did not reveal when the attack would take place.“The video is focused on the war against the Egyptian military.The threat to Israel comes at the end, where it says that they will reach the Jews,” Rafael Green, director of the Jihad and Terrorism Threat Monitor of MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute), told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.Expressing the terrorist group’s intention to attack Israel at an unspecified time, the speaker quoted the well-known hadith: “Judgment Day will not come until you fight the Jews and kill them. The Jews will hide behind stones and trees, and the stones and trees will call, ‘O Muslim, o servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him – except for the gharqad tree, which is the tree of the Jews.’”The 14-minute video “And Then They Will Be Vanquished,” a response to the Egyptian army’s recently launched Operation Martyr’s Right, should be taken seriously, but needs to be put into proportion, said Green.The speaker is a masked gunman who urges Egyptian soldiers to repent or be killed for attacking jihadists in Sinai. He claimed that the army is trying to push out the local population in order to defend Israel.The speaker threatens Israel, saying that the jihadists have not forgotten it, in spite of their current focus on the war against the Egyptian government.He vows that his group will resume its attacks on Israel “soon.”He also vows that Islamic State will lead the Islamic nation, which will “rise up and uproot you [the Jews].”“He warns them that the mujahedin will penetrate deep into the territory of the ‘tyrants,’ hinting at planned operations within Egypt itself, rather than in the Sinai Peninsula,” notes the report.
“Indeed, this apostate army has failed to carry out the mission it was tasked with, and was embarrassed in front of the public and in front of its masters,” he declares.These messages were spoken as footage of civilians allegedly killed by the Egyptian army and blown-up tanks and dead Egyptian soldier were shown.The speaker vows that his group will raise its flag over the Cairo Tower, a famous Cairo landmark.In the summer, Islamic State threatened to turn the Gaza Strip into another of their Middle East fiefdoms, accusing Hamas of being insufficiently stringent about religious enforcement.The video statement, issued from an Islamic State stronghold in Syria, was a rare public challenge to Hamas, which has been cracking down on jihadists in Gaza. Islamic State opposes Hamas’s truces with Israel and reconciliation with the US-backed rival Palestinian faction Fatah.“We will uproot the state of the Jews. You and Fatah, and all of the secularists are nothing.You will be overrun by our creeping multitudes,” said a masked Islamic State member in the message addressed to the “tyrants of Hamas.”Reuters contributed to this report.