United with Israel

Israel’s national intelligence agency is credited with providing information to British law enforcement officials that foiled a 2015 Hezbollah terror plot, endangering not only Jews and Israelis.

By United With Israel Staff

Israeli officials told Kan News that its Mossad intelligence agency was responsible for preventing a mass terror attack, planned by the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, in 2015.

Mossad’s information led Britain’s M15 domestic intelligence agency and London’s Metropolitan Police to a north London location, where thousands of ice packs containing ammonium nitrate were found. The highly explosive materials were meant for future bombing attacks, although it is unclear exactly where these attacks were to take place.

According to sources quoted Sunday in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, which broke the story of the “Iran-linked terrorists caught stockpiling explosives in north-west London,” British intelligence claimed that in order to establish Hezbollah’s full terrorist intentions, it did not immediately disrupt the plot. The discovery followed a “tip-off from a foreign government,” the report said.

Kan clarified the next day that it was in fact the Mossad that tipped off the British authorities about the plot.

Charges were never pressed against the sole suspect in the investigation, the Telegraph reported.

It is suspected that the incident was silenced in order not to disrupt the Iranian nuclear deal, which was being negotiated at the time, according to the report.

“The Security Service and police work tirelessly to keep the public safe from a host of national security threats,” said Ben Wallace, UK minister for security and economic crime. “Necessarily, their efforts and success will often go unseen.”

The Telegraph notes that the plot was part of a larger plan to attack Israeli targets around the world, endangering not only Jews and Israelis. The terror group had stored explosive materials in ice packs in a number of previous cases, most notably in Cyprus, “where a startlingly similar plot had been busted just months before the discovery in London,” the Telegraph said.

Israel, the United States, Canada, the European Union and the Arab League have listed Hezbollah as a terror organization for decades. Britain blacklisted Hezbollah’s military wing only in 2008, and it was not until February 2019 that it banned the entire organization under the Terrorism Act of 2000.