Israeli lawmaker and former military chief Gadi Eisenkot revealed on Sunday that the Israel Defense Forces conducted external operations against Islamic State in 2015.
“ISIS knows best how frequently the IDF acted in the Middle East, and they paid a price in hundreds of killed and injured,” Eisenkot said at an Institute for National Security Studies conference in Tel Aviv.
The National Unity Party Knesset member said that Jerusalem was asked to act against ISIS by an unspecified third party, but did not elaborate.
He also did not reveal where any of the activity took place, saying only that it spanned “many more than one country.”
“There are few states in the world that can identify targets the size of a postage stamp and then strike it with a missile anywhere within a 1,000-kilometer [620 mile] radius... . Our enemies saw us do this, the Russians saw it and so did the Americans,” said Eisenkot.
Israel has over the past decade frequently arrested ISIS-inspired terrorists, including Palestinian Eslam Froukh, who perpetrated November’s twin bombings in Jerusalem.
Israeli authorities have also detained numerous Arab-Israelis planning to join ISIS in Syria.
In April 2022, Islamic State’s official media platform, “Al-Furqan,” released a statement calling on its supporters in Israel to conduct additional terror attacks.
The message described two recent attacks by ISIS supporters as “inspirational,” adding that Jerusalem could “only be liberated from the Jews through the return of the caliphate.”
ISIS also has an affiliate that is active in the Sinai Peninsula.
Six years after the fall of Mosul, Iraq, and the 2019 elimination of the terror group’s founding leader, the self-proclaimed Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS has largely concentrated its rebuilding efforts on Africa and, notably, has made a resurgence in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 2021 U.S. military withdrawal.
