A stunningly high 25 Israelis (including Jews) and foreigners residing in Israel were indicted for spying for Iran in 2025, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) announced in its annual report.
The number of Iranian plots to use Israelis as spies jumped by 400% in 2025 as compared to 2024, which itself had also seen a jump of 400% from 2023 and earlier years.
According to the Shin Bet, 120 separate Iranian spying activities were thwarted last year.
Most of the Jewish-Israelis who spied for Iran did so for money and undertook taking photos of certain installations or other forms of information gathering.
In a separate arena, the Shin Bet reported that 130 Israeli-Arabs were indicted for terror-related offenses, while 219 were arrested. The report said there were 40 cases where some Israeli-Arabs swore allegiance to or undertook activities for ISIS.
Report says Israeli-Arabs swore allegiance to ISIS in 40 cases
Also, the report said that around 20 Israeli-Arab minors were interrogated over suspected terror-related activities, particularly for assisting with artificial-intelligence–generated content, likely linked to phishing attempts aimed at hacking various Israeli electronic accounts.
Collectively, Israeli-Arabs were also involved in five terror attacks.
Besides Israeli-Arab citizens, 129 east Jerusalem residents were arrested under suspicion of terror-related offenses.
Also, 2,530 West Bank Palestinians were arrested under terror suspicions from Shin Bet enforcement activities.
Regarding Gaza terrorists, in 2025 the agency conducted 300 full-fledged interrogations in its facilities. In addition, 1,250 Gaza terrorists were interrogated at the joint IDF-Shin Bet’s Sdei Teiman facility.
Information obtained from these interrogations helped locate senior Hamas officials and Israeli hostages, said the agency.
In numbers terms, the Shin Bet was involved in killing 1,200 Gazan terrorists in 2025 of the close to 2,500 killed.
Over 200 of those terrorists killed were at various command levels, including six senior Hamas leaders: Mohammed Sinwar, who led Hamas from October 2025 to May 2025; Raad Saad, who served as Hamas’s second-in-command from around May 2025 to December 2025; and Rafah Brigade commander Mohammed Shabanah.
The Shin Bet did not include statistics about nationalist Jewish violence in the annual report. The Jerusalem Post requested the data, but the agency had not replied by press time.
Despite the lack of response, the IDF on Monday admitted that Israel’s security forces had failed in 2025 to sufficiently reduce the volume of Jewish extremist violence against West Bank Palestinians.
In 2025, the number of “nationalistic” Jewish incidents, a term the IDF uses to refer to both violent attacks and vandalism targeting Palestinian property, spiked to 867, up from 682 incidents in 2024.
Although the IDF pointed out that the number of incidents was still lower than the 1,045 in 2023 and the 922 in 2022, it was still a far cry from the 446 total in 2021, 353 in 2020, and 339 in 2019.
Beyond the raw data, the IDF also acknowledged that the number of more serious and dangerous incidents, and especially of mass attacks – as opposed to an assault by one or two individuals – increased even more sharply.