Israeli intelligence has helped stop terrorists from using civilian aeroplanes in Europe to carry out major attacks “of the worst kind”, Binyamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday.
The Israeli prime minister told a group of ambassadors from NATO countries that his nation’s intelligence agencies had “helped save many European” lives by passing on warnings of jihadist plots.
He did not give details of the thwarted attacks but said they “involve civil aviation”. “We have, through our intelligence services, provided information that has stopped several dozen major terrorist attacks, many of them in European countries. Some of these could have been mass attacks, of the worst kind that you have experienced on the soil of Europe and even worse, because they involve civil aviation,” Netanyahu said.
Netanyahu said that Israel was helping Europe by preventing the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) from setting up “an alternative territorial base” in the Egyptian Sinai desert following their battlefield defeats in Iraq and Syria.
He told ambassadors that Israel was also working to prevent Iran consolidating its position in Syria. “This is dangerous for you too because the conquest of the Middle East by Iran would eventually effect all of your interests,” he said.
