The government has decided to establish a special forum that will deal with threats to Israelis posed by global jihad organizations, both locally and abroad, Army Radio reported Thursday.
Al-Qaida suicide bombers rammed their car into the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel in Mombasa in November 2002, killing 12 people, including three Israelis, and wounding 80.
Photo: AP
The National Security Council's Counterterrorism Bureau chief, Nitzan Nuriel, is expected to head the forum, which will have members from the Mossad, Shin Bet, IDF and other relevant security apparatuses.
The forum will convene at least once every two months, according to the scale of the threats, with the goal of assisting the collaboration of all the security forces in the face of the growing terror attack warnings.
The Security Cabinet ministers approved the forum's establishment in the hope that institutionalization of the cooperation and coordination between security and intelligence apparatuses would improve Israel's management of the global jihad threat.
Over the years, al-Qaida has succeeded in establishing widespread terror infrastructures around the world.
In 2002, just one year after the 9/11 terror attacks, twelve people, three of them Israelis, were killed in an attack on a Mombasa hotel in Kenya. Al-Qaida was also linked to the 2004 terror attack in Sinai.
The Shin Bet has expressed fears that the group was laying foundations in the West Bank. Israeli security forces recently warned that terrorists associated with al-Qaida would join forces with groups linked to Hizbullah in an attack to avenge the murder of arch terrorist Imad Mugniyeh.
