The Shin Bet has comprehensively interrogated over 650 Gazans this year, while performing some preliminary evaluation of around 2,500 of them, the Israel Security Agency said Tuesday in its 2024 annual report.
This is the first time that the Shin Bet has quantified the full picture of how many Gazan detainees it has seen as valuable enough to carry out a full interrogation.
Out of the over 2,500 Gazans brought to the Shin Bet for evaluation, around 1,350 were arrested in operations in which the Shin Bet directly participated.
Crucially, the agency said that around 100 of those arrested were interrogated for potential information they may have had about the Israeli hostages held by Hamas.
Another 40 of those arrested were senior Gazan terror officials, the report said.
This is the first time that the agency has quantified how many higher value detainees it has received – whether for purposes of trying to locate hostages or by virtue of senior ranks within Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or other terror groups.
Sources told The Jerusalem Post that extra time and energy was invested in these interrogations to try to rapidly obtain information which could be used and translated into rescues of live or dead hostages in the field.
The above numbers did leave many remaining open questions.
For example, the agency did not say what happened to the around 1,850 detainees out of the 2,500 arrested, who it did not perform a detailed questioning of.
Some sources did tell the Post that some lower value detainees were transferred to the IDF and police, while some were sent back to Gaza – without giving numbers.
Other sources said that since the start of the war, the IDF has taken in around 6,000 Gazan detainees, while not saying how many have been returned to Gaza.
Returning Palestinians to Gaza
Numerous sources and reports have confirmed over the course of the war that large numbers of arrested Gazans have been sent back to Gaza if they were not deemed threatening or dangerous enough.
However, the percentages here could be important.
On March 31, the IDF said that it had arrested over 800 suspects at Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza, with over 500 confirmed to be Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad members.
How many of these remained under arrest and are potentially being sent to prison or being kept in indefinite detention, and how many were released back to Gaza?
Reports have said thousands of detained Gazans have been sent back to Gaza over the course of the war, exceeding even the 2,500 number.
In addition, the Shin Bet said it had helped arrest 165 “operatives who were close to senior officials” – though it did not define whether this meant they were deputy commanders of battalions, or personal couriers who helped locate the senior official, but might have lower ranks, or some other kind of operative.
Sources told the Post that these detainees could be relevant to a mix of goals, from finding hostages, to assisting with the best way to maneuver different stages of the IDF invasions of portions of Gaza, to being aware of traps set by Hamas.
Moreover, it said that another 45 “were involved in invasions” – presumably a reference to Hamas’s October 7 invasion.
Thwarting West Bank/Jerusalem terror
Regarding the West Bank and Jerusalem, the Shin Bet report said that it had prevented around 1,040 substantial attacks.
These could be broken down into 689 shooting attacks, 326 improvised explosive attacks, 13 stabbings, nine car rammings, two suicide attacks, and one kidnapping.
In light of the number of terror attacks which were prevented, the agency said that it had succeeded in bringing down the number of “successful” terror attacks by 40%.
According to the report, the Shin Bet carried out dozens of special operations against West Bank and Jerusalem terrorists, including 10 in the field, including the well-known penetration of the hospital in Jenin to go after terrorists concealing themselves there, as well as special operations in Nablus and Tulkarem.
Including all of the many fronts where the Shin Bet operates, its special forces team for preventing a potential real-time terror attack was deployed with the police counter-terror unit 32 times.
Shin Bet special teams were also involved in a number of operations for rescuing live and dead hostages.
Iran
Next, the Shin Bet noted that Iran significantly increased its efforts to harm Israelis: by smuggling more dangerous weapons to West Bank Palestinian terrorists, by trying to recruit physical Israeli spies and agents, and by trying to use cyber attacks against Israelis.
There was a 400% jump in the number of arrests related to Iran’s spying and other efforts against Israelis compared to in 2023.
27 different Israelis have been indicted for various ties to Iran in 13 different episodes in which Tehran tried to utilize and turn Israeli citizens against their own country.
Separately, the Shin Bet noted it thwarted around 20 Israeli-Arab related terror cells, five of which it said were planning some kind of explosive or car explosive attacks.
It was unclear exactly how the agency was delineating between Jewish-Israelis turned by Iran and Israeli-Arabs involved in different forms of terror.
Moreover, the Shin Bet, along with the Israel National Cyber Directorate and the IDF, thwarted over 700 serious cyber attacks on the country, a jump of fives times the number of similar level attacks from the year before.
These 700 attacks are in addition to millions of much smaller level cyber attacks that are undertaken against Israelis on a regular basis.
The report did not discuss Jewish extremist violence against Palestinians.
However, the IDF previously told the Post and other media that in 2024, there have been 663 Jewish extremist violence incidents, in 2023 there were 1,045, and in 2022 there were 947, seeming to show an improvement, but with 663 still far above prior years when there were 446 in 2021, 353 in 2020, and 339 in 2019.
The IDF said that Jewish extremist violence against Palestinians had increased correspondingly to increased Palestinian terror, but does not really have an answer yet for bringing down the levels to pre-2022 levels.
Sources have told the Post that the Shin Bet and IDF have felt it has been harder to combat such violence due to lack of cooperation from the police under National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
Further, the report referenced providing security for hundreds of trips for high level Israeli officials to the war fronts in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria.