JERUSALEM, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Militant groups have stepped up efforts to strike both Israeli and Jewish targets worldwide during the past year, says the director of Israel's Shin Bet security service.
"We've seen a significant acceleration in attempts to act against Israeli and Jewish targets in the world," Yoram Cohen said in a briefing to parliament's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Wednesday.
Shin Bet, as well as the army and Mossad, the foreign intelligence agency, had successfully thwarted militant operations that were in the making, "most of which were not publicized," Cohen said, according to The Jerusalem Post.
The intelligence chief accused Iran of playing a pivotal role in the plots, disclosing that Iranian agents had penetrated the Gaza Strip and were actively training and "imparting knowledge" to local militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the newspaper said.
Describing Gaza as a "giant arms warehouse," Cohen said the two groups had stockpiled thousands of rockets and had some 20,000 fighters between them. He said that rockets and shoulder-launched missiles were flowing unfettered into the coastal territory from Libya, referring to the latter as the "new gate to hell."
Providing scant details on Shin Bet's counter-terrorism operations, Cohen said the agency had compiled a bank of "hundreds of quality targets" in Gaza, which the military could strike from the air or land, pending governmental approval, according to the Post.
Cohen said that militant groups were also active throughout Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and in the West Bank, where Shin Bet has recently uncovered several Palestinian militant cells that operated in the Hebron area and were plotting a string of deadly attacks against Jewish settlers.
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