Yoram Schweitzer is an Israeli intelligence official who is a senior research fellow at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and is director of the institute's Research Program: Terrorism and Low-Intensity Conflict. [1]
During 2017, Schweitzer was to be a visiting fellow at the Center for American Progress. [2] Formerly, he served as a senior Military Intelligence officer and private consultant to the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel.
Schweitzer’s areas of research include the Salafi Jihadi “camp” including The Islamic State (Daesh) and its subjected partners; Al Qaeda [3] and its affiliates; Hezbollah; and Palestinian terror groups. He is an authority on terror related topics, including suicide [4] [5] bombings in which he conducted a project interviewing attempted suicide bombers and their dispatchers.
From 1987 to 1998, Schweitzer intermittently headed the International Terrorism [6] Section of the Israeli Defense Force's Military Intelligence Directorate. During these years, he also served as a ranking member of the Israeli prime minister's MIA task force. Subsequently, Schweitzer served both as the director of education at Herzliya's Institute [7] for Counter-Terrorism, and as a private consultant to the Prime Minister's office on matters of counter-terrorism. In 2003 he joined the INSS, then the Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies. . Schweitzer holds the rank of lieutenant colonel (Lt-Col) in the IDF, and continues to serve in the IDF's reserve forces in his field of expertise.
Schweitzer is currently researching and publishing in the following areas:
Salafiya Jihadia: . Schweitzer is analyzing the brand of global terrorism launched by groups adhering to this belief and its attendant ideology.
Suicide attacks: Schweitzer has explored and probed the mind of the suicide bomber as well as the aims and strategies of those who dispatch them. He conducted a three year-long project comprising in-depth studies, analyses and interviews with attempted suicide bombers, [8] suicide-bombing dispatchers, and leaders of Palestinian terror organizations. This included leaders in Israeli prisons, and others who were released as part of the exchange deal to secure the freedom of Gilad Shalit. Mr. Schweitzer is an authority on female and underage suicide bombers.
Hostage Negotiation/MIA: Pursuant to his service in official capacities in these areas, Schweitzer continues to conduct research on the related topics of hostages and negotiations for their release. [9]
Psychological warfare: Schweitzer is currently studying and analyzing the propaganda campaigns being deployed by the Islamic State as well as by Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. [10] [11] [12]
Sub-conventional warfare: Mr. Schweitzer is currently exploring the tactical and strategic lessons from the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. [13]
Al-Qaeda is a Sunni pan-Islamist militant organization led by Salafi jihadists who self-identify as a vanguard spearheading a global Islamist revolution to unite the Muslim world under a supra-national Islamic state known as the Caliphate. Its members are mostly composed of Arabs, but also include other peoples. Al-Qaeda has mounted attacks on civilian and military targets in various countries, including the 1998 United States embassy bombings and the September 11 attacks; it has been designated as a terrorist group by the United Nations Security Council, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union, and various countries around the world.
Hanadi Tayseer Abdul Malek Jaradat, a Palestinian militant from Jenin, blew herself up on Saturday, 4 October 2003 in a suicide attack on Maxim restaurant in the northern Israeli city of Haifa. Twenty-one people were killed and 51 injured. Among the dead were four Israeli children, including an infant, and three Arabs. She was the sixth female suicide bomber of the Al-Aqsa Intifada and the second woman recruited by Islamic Jihad.
This page is a partial listing of incidents of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2004.
As part of the Arab–Israeli conflict, especially during the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005, Palestinian militant groups used children for suicide bombings. Minors were recruited to attack Israeli targets, both military and civilian. This deliberate involvement of children in armed conflict was condemned by international human rights organizations.
Islamic terrorism refers to terrorist acts with religious motivations carried out by fundamentalist militant Islamists and Islamic extremists.
Targeted killings, targeted prevention, or assassination, has been repeatedly carried out by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) over the course of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict against militants.
The Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, commonly known simply as Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), is a Palestinian Islamist paramilitary organization formed in 1981.
Istishhad is the Arabic word for "martyrdom", "death of a martyr", or "heroic death"..
Brynjar Lia is a Norwegian historian and professor of Middle East Studies at Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo. He is also an adjunct research professor at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) where he headed FFI's research on international terrorism and global jihadism between 1999 and 2011. Lia is viewed as one of Norway's foremost experts on terrorism and is much cited in Norwegian and international media in connection to Al-Qaeda and international terrorism. Lia's last book is about Abu Musab al-Suri, which has been reviewed in publications like Newsweek, The Economist, London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books.
A suicide attack is any violent attack, usually entailing attackers detonating an explosive, where any attackers have accepted their own death as a direct result of the attacking method used. Suicide attacks have occurred throughout history, often as part of a military campaign, and more recently as part of Islamic terrorist campaigns. Although generally not regulated under international law by themselves, many suicide attacks violate international laws of war such as perfidy or targeting civilians.
It is believed that members of Al-Qaeda are hiding along the border of Afghanistan and northwest sections of Pakistan. In Iraq, elements loosely associated with al-Qaeda, in the Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad organization commanded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, have played a key role in the War in Iraq.
The Abdullah Azzam Brigades, or al-Qaeda in Lebanon, is a Sunni Islamist militant group, and al-Qaeda's branch in Lebanon. The group, which began operating in 2009, was founded by Saudi Saleh Al-Qaraawi and has networks in various countries, mainly in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.
Inspire is an English-language online magazine published by the organization al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The magazine is one of the many ways AQAP uses the Internet to reach its audience. Numerous international and domestic extremists motivated by radical interpretations of Islam have been influenced by the magazine and, in some cases, used its bomb-making instructions in their attempts to carry out attacks. The magazine is an important brand-building tool, not just of AQAP, but of all al-Qaeda branches, franchises and affiliates.
Events in the year 2005 in Israel.
On August 18, 2011, a series of cross-border attacks with parallel attacks and mutual cover was carried out in southern Israel on Highway 12 near the Egyptian border by a squad of presumably twelve militants in four groups. The attacks occurred after Israel's interior security service Shin Bet had warned of an attack by militants in the region and Israeli troops had been stationed in the area. The militants first opened fire at an Egged No. 392 bus as it was traveling on Highway 12 in the Negev near Eilat. Several minutes later, a bomb was detonated next to an Israeli army patrol along Israel's border with Egypt. In a third attack, an anti-tank missile hit a private vehicle, killing four civilians. Eight Israelis – six civilians, one Yamam special unit police sniper and one Golani Brigade soldier—were killed in the multiple-stage attack. The Israel Defense Forces reported eight attackers killed, and Egyptian security forces reported killing another two.
The Egyptian Islamic Jihad, formerly called simply Islamic Jihad and the Liberation Army for Holy Sites, originally referred to as al-Jihad, and then the Jihad Group, or the Jihad Organization, is an Egyptian Islamist group active since the late 1970s. It is under worldwide embargo by the United Nations as an affiliate of Al-Qaeda. It is also banned by several individual governments worldwide. The group is a proscribed terrorist group organization in the United Kingdom under the Terrorism Act 2000.
Yafim Weinstein was a 54-year-old Israeli man murdered in 2009.
Shaul Shay is a military historian and former deputy head of the National Security Council (Israel)
Al-Qaeda in the Sinai Peninsula, or AQSP, was an Egyptian militant jihadist organization possibly formed by a merger between al-Qaeda operatives in Sinai and Ansar al Jihad. It was Al-Qaeda's branch in the Sinai peninsula, and is composed of many Al-Qaeda factions in the area. AQSP made international headlines in November 2014 when the organization pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) in a nine-minute audio speech released on Twitter.