Defence chief: terrorists mostly hiding from us
THE CHAIRMAN of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, Avi Dichter, has said that progress made by the Israeli security services meant that terrorists now spend 95 per cent of their time hiding and only five per cent on operations.
Mr Dichter ( a former head of Shin Bet, was in London this week to have meetings with British defence and Foreign Office officials, as well as address the annual dinner of Magen David Adom.
Mr Dichter said that the modification in terror- ists’ behaviour was one of his major achievements as Shin Bet chief. He said he had “changed the timetable of the terrorists”, so that they spend most of their time on the run.
Since 1994, he said, the Palestinian Authority had failed to take a single terrorist to court. Instead, there was a “revolving door” situation and it remained Israel’s task to bring prosecutions. So far, he said, Israel had destroyed the infrastructure of Hamas in the West Bank and brought more than 8,000 terrorists to court. “The name of the game is detaining them,” he said, “not killing them. We don’t have any tools to get information from dead people, only live ones.”
Mr Dichter said he was “proud” of Israel’s insistence on going the extra mile to swap terrorist prisoners for Israeli citizens, alive or dead. “I know there is no consensus on this in Israel. As Jewish people we are honouring alive or dead citizens, and we have paid some very tough prices over the years. When I used to send people on crossborder raids, into some very dangerous situations, they knew and I knew, that if God forbid something happened, we would make all efforts to bring them