In a joint statement Friday, Israel Police and the Israel Defense Forces said troops in the Jordan Valley, with the assistance of soldiers operating surveillance cameras, located two bags with dozens of firearms along the border.
Law enforcement officials said they suspected the weapons were headed to be sold for both criminal and terror purposes.
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The guns were estimated to be worth some NIS 2 million ($625,000), according to police.
There were no immediate arrests in connection to the apparent smuggling attempt.
Unlike Israel’s other frontiers — with Egypt,
...The land area formerly occupied by the state of Lebanon, before that Phoenicia...and Syria — its border with Jordan is largely open, often without significant fencing, and is relatively unguarded, making it an easy location for large-scale smuggling.
The IDF has stepped up efforts to halt smuggling attempts along the Jordanian border in recent months, but officials have admitted that the military has failed to achieve much success thus far.
Police have increasingly sought to crack down on the until-now unmitigated spread of illegal weapons in the Arab Israeli community, which have been used to carry out record-breaking numbers of murders in recent years.
According to the Abraham Initiatives, a non-government group lobbying against violence in the Arab community, there were 125 Arabs — an all-time record — killed in Israel in 2021 as a result of violence and crime. Since the beginning of this year, another 12 have been killed in incidents of
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Gun-smuggling: 2021-06-19 Security forces foil gun smuggling from Lebanon masked as agricultural work
Gun-smuggling: 2020-09-29 Six bodies, one injured found in sewage pit in Palestinian village
Gun-smuggling: 2020-05-15 Soldier hurt in suspected car-ramming in southern West Bank; driver shot dead