Israel’s security agency Shin Bet announced Wednesday that it has thwarted 250 “significant terror attacks” against the Jewish State since January – attributing its success mainly to high-tech surveillance and tracking tools.

Shin Bet Director Nadav Argaman explained to public security ministers at an international conference in Jerusalem that so-called “lone wolf” attacks in Israel and the West Bank are becoming more common than threats from organized Islamic terror groups – such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

“The map of threats and challenges is varied and covers multiple unstable and difficult fronts,” Argaman, who has led his group since 2016, explained , according to the Times of Israel. “Since the start of the year, the Shin Bet security service has prevented 250 significant terror attacks – including suicide bombings, kidnappings and shootings.”

The head of Shin bet released the statistics just hours after his agency announced that it arrested a Palestinian man suspected of fatally crushing an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldier’s head with a stone slab in Ramallah’s al-Am’ari refugee camp last month.

Israeli tech making it harder for terrorists

At Israel’s rate of thwarting terrorist attacks this year, it will easily surpass last year’s total.

“In December, Argaman told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that the agency had thwarted over 400 terrorist attacks in 2017, including 13 suicide attacks and eight kidnappings, as well as 1,100 potential lone-wolf attacks,” the Jerusalem Post reported. “He further noted at that time that in 2017, 54 attacks were successfully carried out, in comparison with 108 successful attacks in 2016.”

The numbers show that as Israel’s technology advances, so does it efficiency in nabbing terrorist attacks.

“In 2016, the Shin Bet stopped 344 major attacks, meaning the total number of thwarted and successful attacks was similar for 2016 and 2017, but the security agency succeeded in thwarting more of them in 2017,” the Jerusalem Post’s Yonah Jeremy Bob divulged. “The major improvement was seen in the 400 potential lone-wolf attacks prevented in 2016, compared to 1,100 such potential attacks in 2017.”

Being one of the most innovative and technologically advanced nations in the world evidently had a lot to do with Israel’s ability to nab terrorist attacks before they come to fruition.

“The Shin Bet chief said part of the way his agency had been able to effectively respond to the ‘lone wolf’ attacks – which have confounded security services around the world in recent years – was through the use of advanced technological techniques like ‘big data’ – large amounts of information from which researchers can attempt to make predictions,” the Times of Israel’s Judah Ari Gross reported.

Argaman noted how state-of-the-art advances – and his agency’s savviness to effectively utilize them – puts it at an advantage when it comes to Israel’s war on terror from against hostile neighbors in the volatile Powder Keg of the Middle East.

“The Shin Bet security service knew to adapt itself and use technological, intelligence and operational tools in order to find these assailants ahead of time,” the security expert explained. “The great investment in technological developments in the worlds of ‘big data,’ machine learning and artificial intelligence by the Shin Bet has created a great leap forward from intelligence extraction to intelligence prediction for the purposes of preventing terror attacks and terrorist intentions before they’re carried out.”

Yet Argaman noted that “classic” intelligence methods were also implemented by Shin Bet in its counter-terrorism operations.

“In late 2015 and early 2016, Israel was struck by a wave of regular terror attacks – mostly in the form of stabbings, car rammings and shootings – across Israel and the West Bank,” Gross recounted. “The Shin Bet, Israel Defense Forces and other security services initially struggled to prevent the attacks, which were being carried out by these ‘lone wolves,’ having spent decades training to counter the types of threats posed by organized terror groups.”

Putting the right technology in place curbed these forms of anti-Semitic terrorism by jihadists in Israel.

“By mid-2016, the number of attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers had returned to their regular levels, which Israeli defense officials credited to new policies and tools put in place to combat these independent attacks,” Gross added. “Though at a much lower rate, terror attacks by Palestinian ‘lone wolves’ still occur in Israel.”

Sharing tools for a safer Israel

Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld indicated that Israel’s law enforcement is making a concerted effort to share its intelligence and experience with Israeli Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan and ministers of homeland security from 20 other nations attending the Jerusalem forum.

“We’re sharing intelligence strategies, how we deal with preventing those attacks, what are the global threats that exist here in Israel, which of course are global threats that exist in Europe and other countries around the world; how we can improve transferring intelligence. because when you have strong intelligence, you can prevent a terrorist attack from taking place,” Rosenfeld told CBN News. “There’s a joint language, understanding between the ministers about what the message is [and] how we need to improve and prevent those threats from becoming real, like, unfortunately, we’ve experienced in Israel for many years.”

He credited the declining number of successful terrorist attacks over the past year to Israel’s handling of lone wolf attacks.

“We’ve developed strategies and implemented ways on the ground to prevent those attacks from taking place,” Rosenfeld continued.

After mentioning that Islamic terrorists carried out hundreds of serious attacks against Israel since 2015, Erdan emphasized that the forum’s focus was to augment cooperation in the war on terror, which includes combatting radicalization, incitement and cyber threats.

“[There are two] defining characteristics [in the current] wave of terror – [the] central role of incitement and radicalization, especially online, [and] the simplicity of the attacks carried out by individuals with easily accessible weapons and without the command and control structures of traditional terrorist groups,” Erdan explained, according to CBN News. “[These are] hi-tech communications [used to carry out] low-tech operations.”

He said that terrorists are increasingly using the Internet to stage their attacks.

“In the period leading up to the outbreak of these attacks – especially in the first half year of the terror wave – we were witness to an intense campaign of online and real-world incitement,” Erdan pointed out, noting that social media must play a dynamic role in fighting terrorism by utilizing the same tools terrorists use to fund their attacks. “[Israel set up a team to combat online incitement using] advanced web-intelligence tools and algorithms to identify potential terrorists. The World-Wide-Web must not be the Wild West.”

United States Homeland Security Kirjsten Neilson argued that nations must band together and make a concerted effort to keep terrorists from penetrating their borders if they are to win the war on terror.

“What this means is that a terrorist in your country is virtually in mine, and we have to really think about what that means as this threat evolves,” she impressed. “So, your risk is very much my risk – my risk is yours.”

The American security expert went on to assure that a “collective defense” is the only true way to effectively combat the threat of terrorism today.

“If we prepare individually, we will fail collectively,” Neilson contended. “Making sure that we can block terrorists from crossing borders physically – after they have in fact crossed our borders virtually – is vital. We must keep them out of our countries.”