Israel’s multi-faceted battle against terrorism continued on Monday after two Israeli Arabs with ties to ISIS were charged by Hadera’s Magistrates Court.

According to the indictment, Abed al-Mahadi Gabareen and Nayim Gabareen first met while attending prayers at a mosque located in Umm al-Fahm. The pair allegedly hatched a plot in May 2024 to pledge allegiance to ISIS in Syria. Their primary objective was to terrorize those they deemed to be heretics, specifically targeting Shiite Muslims.

Both suspects secured one-way plane tickets to Turkey on June 11 and booked hotel stays in Gaziantep from which they would cross by foot into Syrian territory. The absence of return tickets raised alarms for security officials at Ben Gurion International Airport who detained the suspects until the Shin Bet arrived to interrogate them.

This is not the first time that Israel has thwarted ISIS terror plots.

In June, the Shin Bet revealed that it arrested a 17-year-old in the Arab village of Ara near Haifa. The suspect allegedly had been making extensive preparations to join ISIS’s jihadi campaign in Somalia, including raising funds, attempting to obtain a foreign passport, and communicating with the terror group.

While Hamas aligns with Iran’s apocalyptic Shiite radicals and ISIS leads a Sunni death cult, they find perfect harmony in their bloodthirsty hatred for the Jewish state. Both terror organizations cling to a fundamentalist ideology that views Israel’s very existence as an affront to Islam, twisting religious texts to justify their campaigns of violence against innocent civilians.

ISIS’s horrific propaganda videos bear chilling similarities to Hamas’s own inflammatory homages to “martyrs” and their celebration of Jewish carnage. Numerous reports have shed light on the ways both terror groups weaponize antisemitic doctrines to manipulate the minds of their youth.