Twenty-five Israelis – including Jews – and foreigners residing in Israel were indicted for spying for Iran in 2025, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) reported this week.
The number of Iranian plots to use Israelis as spies jumped 400% in 2025 compared with 2024, which also had increased 400% compared with 2023 and earlier years, it said in its annual report.
Last year, 120 separate Iranian spying incidents were thwarted, the report said.
Most of the Jewish Israelis who spied for Iran did so for money, it said, adding that they photographed certain installations or engaged in other forms of information gathering.
Separately, 130 Arab Israelis were indicted for terrorism-related offenses, and 219 were arrested, the Shin Bet reported. In 40 instances, some Arab Israelis swore allegiance to ISIS or undertook activities on its behalf, it said.
Report says Israeli-Arabs swore allegiance to ISIS in 40 cases
About 20 Arab Israeli minors were interrogated over suspected terrorism-related activities, particularly for assisting with artificial-intelligence-generated content, which were likely linked to phishing attempts aimed at hacking various Israeli electronic accounts, the Shin Bet said.
Arab Israelis were also involved in five terrorist attacks, it said.
Besides Arab Israeli citizens, 129 east Jerusalem residents were arrested under suspicion of terrorism-related offenses, the report said. In addition, 2,530 West Bank Palestinians were arrested on suspicion of involvement terrorist activities, it said.
Regarding terrorists in the Gaza Strip, the Shin Bet said it had conducted 300 full-fledged interrogations in its facilities in 2025. In addition, 1,250 Gazan terrorists were interrogated at the joint IDF-Shin Bet Sdei Teiman detention facility.
Information obtained from these interrogations helped locate senior Hamas officials and Israeli hostages, the report said.
The Shin Bet was involved in killing about 1,200 out of the estimated 2,500 Gazan terrorists who were eliminated in 2025, it said.
More than 200 of the killed terrorists were at various command levels, including six senior Hamas leaders: Mohammed Sinwar, who led Hamas from October 2025 to May 2025; Raad Saad, who served as Hamas’s second-in-command from around May 2025 to December 2025; and Rafah Brigade commander Mohammed Shabanah.
The Shin Bet did not include statistics about nationalist Jewish violence in the report. The Jerusalem Post requested the data, but the agency had not replied by press time.
Despite the lack of a response, the IDF on Monday said the security forces had failed to sufficiently reduce the volume of Jewish extremist violence against West Bank Palestinians in 2025.
Last year, the number of “nationalistic” Jewish incidents, a term the IDF uses to refer to both violent attacks and vandalism targeting Palestinian property, spiked to 867, up from 682 incidents in 2024, the IDF reported.
Although the number of incidents was lower than the 1,045 in 2023 and the 922 in 2022, it was higher than the 446 in 2021, 353 in 2020, and 339 in 2019. The number of more serious and dangerous incidents – especially mass attacks, as opposed to an assault by one or two individuals – increased even more.