Islamic Jihad militants captured Israeli intelligence servers while participating in the Hamas attack on Israel last month, the group’s representative in Iran claimed on Wednesday. Nasser Abu-Sharif said the servers contained the names of multiple Israeli spies, some of whom were operating in Iran.
During the October 7 assault, “the resistance managed to take the Israeli regime’s intelligence servers to Gaza,” Abu-Sharif announced at an event in Tehran, according to Iranian media.
“The servers contained the names of many spies, even those who were inside the Islamic Republic [of Iran],” he added.
Islamic Jihad is the largest militant group in Gaza after Hamas, although it also has a significant presence in the West Bank. Unlike Hamas, Islamic Jihad has no political wing, and concentrates solely on the armed struggle against Israel. An unknown number of Islamic Jihad fighters joined the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, storming villages and military installations near the Gazan border and taking around 30 hostages back to the Palestinian enclave.
On November 5, Iran’s state-owned IRNA news agency announced the arrest of three spies working for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. While the arrests took place almost a month after the alleged seizure of the servers, it is unclear if these databases played a role. IRNA reported that the suspects were arrested in the mountainous Afghan border region in a joint operation between Iranian and Afghan authorities.
Iran and Israel regularly accuse each other of espionage, and both nations often claim to have captured each other’s spies. After Saudi media published a video purportedly showing the interrogation of an Iranian military chief by Mossad agents last July, Tehran’s Ministry of Intelligence claimed that it had arrested “a network of agents” from Israel who were allegedly preparing “sabotage and terrorist operations” within Iran.