Israel arrests Palestinian accused of IS-inspired knife murders

Israeli police and the Shin Bet internal security service Thursday said they had captured a Palestinian asserted Islamic State ally blamed for two lethal blade assaults in the beyond three years.

Wassim Isaid, 34, from Hebron in the occupied West Bank, has been held since last month and an prosecutor’s assertion was documented against him Thursday, with an arraignment expected soon, the police and Shin Bet said in a joint proclamation.

The security services charged that he was involved in crimes “stemmed from his support for the ideology of the Islamic State, to which he had previously sworn allegiance”.

The police and Shin Bet said their case against Isaid meant that they had solved two murder cases and another case of attempted murder.

The latest was the killing of Moldovan citizen Ivan Tarnovsky and the serious wounding of a compatriot in their Jerusalem home on March 21 this year.

Previously, an Israeli couple — Yehuda and Tamar Kaduri — were killed in their Jerusalem home on January 13, 2019.

Isaid was further accused of a knife attack that wounded an Israeli teenager in the same city on January 12, 2019.

Hours after allegedly killing Tarnovsky, the suspect was arrested by border police while trying to cross a fence that is part of the separation barrier with the West Bank, the statement said.

At the time “a knife was seized in the suspect’s possession,” and the investigation has since then “linked the terrorist to the attacks”.

Isaid has previously been imprisoned by both Israel and the Palestinian Authority since 2015.

He was jailed by Israel for “activity in an Islamic State network” which planned attacks and he later spent time in administrative detention for “incitement and membership in a hostile organization,” according to the statement.

The timeline provided by police said the suspect committed the attacks during brief gaps when he was out of custody.

Only relatively small numbers of Palestinians joined IS before the jihadist group’s final territorial defeat in Syria in 2019, but Israel has recently suffered attacks by local IS supporters.

Israel has suffered two deadly attacks which were claimed or inspired by IS in recent weeks.

In recent month, two Israeli-Arab gunmen recognized  by Israeli intelligence as IS operatives killed two police officers in Hadera.

And in an earlier attack in southern Israel, about four people were killed in a stabbing and car-ramming rampage by an Israeli Arab previously imprisoned for trying to join IS in Syria.