Iran's efforts to recruit Jews in Israel to spy for it

Israel’s arrest of about 30 mostly Jewish citizens accused of spying for Iran, organized through nine secret cells, has sparked panic in the country and signals the most significant effort by Iran in decades to infiltrate the Jewish state, four Israeli security sources told Reuters.

The targets of the dismantled cells included the assassination of an Israeli nuclear scientist and former Israeli military officials, the Shin Bet security service said, while the cells had collected intelligence on Israeli military bases and air defenses.

Last week, the Shin Bet and Israeli police said a cell including the father and son had relayed details of Israeli troop movements, including in the Golan Heights, where they lived.

The four current and former Israeli military and security officials told Reuters that the arrests follow repeated efforts by Iranian intelligence agents over the past two years to recruit ordinary Israelis to gather information and carry out attacks in exchange for money.

“There is a big phenomenon here,” Shalom Ben Hanan, a former senior official in Israel’s Shin Bet internal security service, told Reuters, referring to what he called the surprising number of Jewish citizens who knowingly agreed to work for Iran against the state by gathering intelligence or planning sabotage and attacks.

In a statement sent to the media after the wave of cell arrests, Iran’s mission to the United Nations neither confirmed nor denied that it was seeking to recruit Israelis, saying that “from a logical standpoint, any such efforts by the Iranian intelligence services would focus on non-Iranian and non-Muslim individuals to reduce suspicion.”

Israeli police and the Shin Bet security service said at least two of the suspects were from Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community.

In contrast to Iranian espionage operations in previous decades that recruited a prominent businessman and a former government minister, the new alleged spies were mostly people on the fringes of Israeli society, including recent immigrants, army deserters and convicted sex offenders, conversations with sources, court records and official statements show.

The Shin Bet security service said much of their activity was limited to spraying anti-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or the government graffiti on walls and damaging cars.

Still, the scope of the arrests and the involvement of so many Jewish Israelis, as well as Arab citizens, has caused concern in Israel at a time when it is still at war with Iran-backed Hamas in Gaza and a ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon remains fragile.

The Shin Bet security service said on October 21, 2024, that the espionage activities were “among the most severe that the State of Israel has ever known.”

The arrests also come on the heels of a wave of attempted assassinations and kidnappings linked to Iran in Europe and the United States.

Shalom Ben Hanan told Reuters that the unusual decision to provide detailed public accounts of the alleged plots was a move by Israel’s security services to signal to Iran and potential saboteurs inside Israel that they would be caught.

“You want to alert the public, and you also want to make an example of people who may have intentions or plans to cooperate with the enemy,” he told Reuters.

Israel has scored major intelligence successes in the past few years in a covert war with its regional foe, including the killing of a top nuclear scientist in the capital Tehran.

A current military official told Reuters that with the latest arrests, Israel has so far thwarted Iran’s efforts to retaliate.

Iran has been weakened by Israeli attacks on its proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon and the fall of its main ally, former President Bashar al-Assad, in Syria.

Israeli police said in a video released in November 2024, warning of ongoing recruitment efforts by Iran, that Iranian intelligence agencies often find potential targets on social media.

The recruitment efforts are sometimes direct, with one message sent to an Israeli civilian seen by Reuters promising $15,000 for information, along with an email address and contact number.

One source, a former senior official who worked in Israeli counterintelligence efforts until 2007, told Reuters that Iran has also reached out to immigrant networks of Jews from the Caucasus living in Canada and the United States.