The Israel Police and the Shin Bet security service recently thwarted a plot by five Arab Israeli citizens to carry out a car-bombing attack at Tel Aviv’s Azrieli Mall under the banner of the Islamic State terror group, according to a joint statement Thursday.

The five residents of Taybeh in central Israel formed a terror cell allied to ISIS, the fanatical terror group that originated in Iraq and Syria.

The five were arrested after a month-long clandestine investigation in collaboration with the Lahav 433 serious crime unit and were set to face charges in the coming days. The cell’s leaders were named as Mahmoud Azam and Ibrahim Sheik Yousef. They recruited three others — Sajed Masarwa, Abdullah Baransi and Abdel Kareem Baransi.

Police and the Shin Bet said that the five had studied footage of terror attacks in Syria and discussed the amount of explosives needed to bring down Tel Aviv’s iconic Azrieli towers.

Azam and Yousef were in contact with foreign ISIS agents and planned to travel abroad to meet with operatives from the terror group, the statement added, noting that the plan was uncovered with the help of “precise and effective intelligence operations,” and had been halted in its preliminary stages.

The statement said that the arrests “prevented a major disaster and saved lives” and vowed that the police and Shin Bet would continue to “use all means at their disposal to thwart plots to harm the security of the State of Israel and its citizens.”

The announcement came after a Border Police officer was killed and at least 10 others wounded when an Arab Israeli terrorist opened fire in the Beersheba bus station on Sunday afternoon.

Then on Wednesday, an Arab Israeli man went on a stabbing spree in the central city of Hadera, wounding six people, one of whom succumbed to his injuries a day later.

The arrests also came days after the anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 mass onslaught against southern Israel, which was the worst terror attack in Israel’s history, and a week after a deadly shooting attack in Jaffa in which two Palestinian terrorists from Hebron opened fire at a light rail stop, killing seven people.