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The United States and its allies adopted a ‘tactic more rooted in diplomacy, partner capacity building and prevention’ rather than a ‘military-centric, U.S.-led approach,’ according to the report.
By JNS
Although the United States and its global partners have had “key counterterrorism successes,” world terror groups “remained resilient and determined,” according to the new U.S. State Department report on terrorism in 2023.
“In 2023, Iran remained the leading state sponsor of terrorism, facilitating a wide range of terrorist and other illicit activities in the United States and globally,” the department states in its report, which it is required to file with the U.S. Congress annually.
Global terror is “fast-moving, complex and ideologically diverse,” the report states, noting the Hamas-led terror attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, “which killed 32 U.S. citizens—with five others still held hostage as this report is being drafted—were a stark and horrific reminder that terrorist groups overseas remain a persistent and pervasive threat to the United States and U.S. citizens and facilities abroad.”
“The ensuing crisis in Gaza has exacerbated widespread instability across the Middle East and globally, with terrorists and violent extremists across the ideological spectrum exploiting the conflict to threaten attacks against U.S. interests worldwide,” it adds.
The United States and its allies adopted a “tactic more rooted in diplomacy, partner capacity building and prevention” rather than a “military-centric, U.S.-led approach,” according to the report.
“This balance recognizes the full range of counterterrorism tools and ensures a more sustainable whole-of-government and whole-of-society counterterrorism approach with allies and partners around the world,” it states.
The report notes that beyond the terror attacks on Israel, Hezbollah’s rocket fire forced the Israeli government to evacuate “some 80,000 civilians from its northern border for their own safety.”
“Separate from the war in Gaza, Israeli authorities reported 289 shooting attacks in 2023, after 305 such incidents reported in 2022,” according to the report.
“Most of the shootings occurred as Israeli troops entered Palestinian cities in the West Bank to arrest suspects allegedly involved in terrorist activities, but many terrorist attacks targeted Israeli civilians.”
(The Biden administration, and some others, refer to Judea and Samaria as “the West Bank.”)
The State Department report cited data from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which “reported 1,232 incidents of Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, including 871 attacks against Palestinian property, 52 attacks that caused physical injury and 134 attacks that caused both property damage and injury, the highest level of violent incidents in the West Bank Judea and Samaria ever recorded since the United Nations started reporting settler-related violence in 2005.”
The report adds that “settler attacks on Palestinians increased after Oct. 7” and that the State Department “made public statements condemning Israeli settler violence, and in some cases referred to it as terrorism, including in August following the murder of a Palestinian by a group of armed settlers.”
Additionally, “the Palestinian Authority and the PLO continued payments to Palestinian security prisoners, some of whom were connected to terrorism, and the families of ‘martyrs’ likewise connected to acts of terrorism,” the report states.
The authority’s “2017 cybercrime law prohibited the production or sharing of content that jeopardizes ‘the public order,’ including promoting human trafficking, drugs and terrorism,” per the report.
“However, PA enforcement has been inconsistent. Certain official PA traditional and social media, affiliated with the Fatah political party, featured content praising or condoning acts of terrorism.”
Islamic Republic
The Iranian government, as it has done in prior years, “continued supporting terrorist plots or associated activities targeting dissidents and other perceived enemies of the regime,” according to the report.
It noted that the U.S. Justice Department unsealed an indictment in 2023 charging three people with connections to Iran of trying to kill an Iranian dissident in New York City.
A U.K. court also found a man who had ties to the Islamic Republic guilty of gathering information for terror purposes.
“In recent years, Albania, Belgium and the Netherlands have all either arrested, convicted or expelled Iranian government officials implicated in various terrorist plots in their respective territories,” the report states.
“Denmark similarly recalled its ambassador from Tehran after learning of an Iran-backed plot to kill an Iranian dissident in that country.”
“Iran pursued or supported terrorist attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets in 2023, including a thwarted plot to attack Israeli tourists in Cyprus,” it adds. “These plots were being implemented by current and former members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force.”
English (US) ·