An attempted suicide bombing attack in Tel Aviv several months ago was planned and carried out under the supervision of the Hamas terror group’s headquarters in Turkey, the Shin Bet and Israel Police said on Tuesday.
In a joint statement, the two agencies said they arrested and charged eight people accused of planning and carrying out the attack, as well as another person accused of transporting the suicide bomber from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.
The incident, which took place August 18, saw a man walk down a street in south Tel Aviv wearing a backpack holding a bomb, which then exploded, killing the terrorist instantly and moderately wounding a passerby.
If the bomb had not gone off outdoors, authorities said at the time, “it would have caused vast damage and multiple casualties.”
According to a statement from police and the Shin Bet, the attempted attack was carried out by Jaafar Muna, a Hamas operative from the West Bank city of Nablus.
He worked together with other terror operatives there, who maintained contact throughout the planning process with Abada Bilal, a senior official at Hamas headquarters in Turkey, who directed the operation, the statement said.
One of the operatives traveled several times to Turkey, receiving funding and explosives training from Hamas members there, the investigation revealed.
Over the course of the investigation, carried out in cooperation with the Central Investigations Unit of the Tel Aviv District Police, Shin Bet agents seized two ready-to-use TATP explosive devices weighing about 4 kilograms (8.8 pounds), as well as about 4 kilograms of TATP meant for additional attacks inside Israeli territory.
Hamas has called for a renewal of suicide bombings, a tactic that killed hundreds of Israelis during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s but has become rare in the decades since following the construction of a security barrier around the West Bank.
The security agency also seized some NIS 111,000 ($29,600) that had been transferred from Hamas’s headquarters in Turkey.
According to the statement, military prosecutors were set to file an indictment on terrorism charges on Tuesday against eight people accused of involvement in the attack.
Another person — a resident of Beit Hanina in East Jerusalem — has also been indicted. It was not immediately clear whether he is an Israeli citizen. According to Channel 12, some of the people charged in connection with the attack were Arab Israelis; the others were Palestinians.
The announcement shines a spotlight on Hamas’s operations in Turkey, which has been an outspoken supporter of the terror group since its October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, when terrorists killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 hostages, starting the ongoing war.
“The findings of this investigation clearly indicate the establishment of Hamas headquarters in Turkey and their extensive efforts abroad to incite violence and carry out bombings in Israel,” the Shin Bet and Israel Police said in their statement Tuesday.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s embrace of Hamas, and his frequent comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler, have worsened already fraught relations between Israel and Turkey, which were once cordial allies.