TEL AVIV (Dispatches) – Seventy percent of all gun attacks in the occupied territories over the past year were carried out using stolen army weapons, according to a report on Walla news website.
Based on official statistics released by the occupying regime’s military, 464 out of a total of 675 shooting incidents reported this year involved the use of stolen military-grade weapons. The figure represents a 5 percent increase compared with the statistics in a similar report published a decade ago.
As well as firearms, a record number of explosive devices have been stolen from army bases. The findings also reveal that most of the stolen weapons were initially smuggled out from Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan.
“While the Egyptian and Lebanese fences are harder to smuggle weapons or drugs through, the Jordanian fence is basically just barbed wire,” said the report, citing a military source.
According to the regime’s daily Haaretz, thousands of weapons and munitions are stolen from the regime’s military each year.
In January, the regime’s parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee discussed the issue of weapon thefts from the military.
According to a Knesset press release, a total of 80 firearms were stolen from military bases last year, although it claimed that this was amid a “constant decrease in theft from the army” since an incident in 2017 at the Sde Teiman base in the southern part of the occupied territory when 33 assault rifles were stolen and sold to criminal organizations in the north.
It is noteworthy that the increase in stolen weapons from the military has corresponded with a rising number of attacks. More than 100 have been killed since the start of the year in “crime-related incidents”, according to the Jerusalem Post.