Netanyahu: Israel foiled attack on airplane heading to Gulf

Israel’s security services have used cyber security to thwart 50 Daesh attacks around the world, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the Cyber Week conference at Tel Aviv University on Wednesday.

They included a plot to bomb a United Arab Emirates Etihad Airways flight from the Australian city of Sydney to Abu Dhabi, he added.

“The plane from Sydney to Abu Dhabi was not going to be hijacked but exploded in midair,” he said. “We used our cyber tools to discover that ISIS [Daesh] was going to do this, and so we alerted the Australian police and they stopped it before it could happen.”

“This particular incident I can talk about because it was leaked to the media,” Netanyahu said. “If you multiply that by 50, it will give you an idea of the contribution that Israel has made to prevent major terrorist operations, especially from ISIS, in dozens of countries. Most of those cases were foiled because of our cybersecurity operations.”

An Australian court on 1 May found a man guilty of plotting to blow up an Etihad Airways flight out of Sydney at the behest of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militant group, by hiding a bomb in the luggage of his brother.

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