The Israel Police have arrested five Arab residents of Jerusalem’s Shuafat district, including the owner of a neighborhood supermarket chain, as part of a terror funding probe, authorities said on Tuesday.
“The Israel Border Police, the Israel Police Special Patrol Unit and the Israel Tax Authority carried out an operation against a prominent Hamas operative in Shuafat,” the agencies announced in a joint statement.
An initial investigation showed that the owner of the supermarket chain, which has branches throughout the eastern part of Israel’s capital, engaged in “laundering and securing terrorist funds, and transferring them through businesses that he owns,” police said.
During recent raids on the supermarket branches, security forces were said to have seized “hundreds of thousands of shekels in cash, checks up to the amount of one million shekels [$266,000] and many other means which the suspects used for money laundering with terrorist intent.”
In the months following the Oct. 7 Hamas-led massacre, Israeli security forces have witnessed an increase in terrorist activities across eastern Jerusalem, where Arabs comprise a majority of the population.
In the two weeks preceding Ramadan, which was celebrated between March 11 and April 9 this year, police detained 21 residents of eastern Jerusalem on suspicion of incitement.
On April 4, four Arabs from eastern Jerusalem who had sworn allegiance to Islamic State, two of whom planned to attack a police station near the Teddy sports stadium, were indicted on terror charges in an Israeli court.
In late January, security forces thwarted an ISIS-inspired attack that was to be carried out near the Knesset by two eastern Jerusalem residents.
The previous month, security forces arrested two Arabs from the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Jebel Mukaber plotting terror attacks in the capital city. The two were influenced by ISIS content online and on Telegram, including graphic videos of killings around the world.
