On November 9, Ansar Bait al-Maqdis (ABM), which has been operating against the Egyptian army, released an audio clip pledging allegiance to the IS to declare later the first IS Wilayah (province) in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, south of Israel.
On last November 14 The Israeli Daily quoted Netanyahu as saying in a private defense meeting that the IS is "currently operating out of Lebanon, close to Israel's northern border. We must take this as a serious threat."
However, "in truth, as most of Israel's intelligence community has been quick to point out, there are no signs that anything of the sort is actually happening," according to Amos Harel, writing in Foreign Policy five days later.
Moshe Ya'alon told journalists in September that "the organization operates far from Israel" and thus presents no imminent threat. Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, on November 14, wrote: "The present and former generals who shape Israel's policy can only smile when this 'danger' is mentioned."
Israel "certainly does not see the group as an external threat" and the "Islamic State also does not yet pose an internal threat to Israel," according to Israeli journalist and Associate Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, Dimi Reider, writing in a Reuters blog on last October 21.
What Netanyahu described as a "serious threat" in the north does not yet dictate any Israeli action against it because "we must assume that Hizballah," which is allied to Syria and Iran, "does not have its house in order," according to the Israeli premier.
The presence of the IS Wilayah on its southern border with Egypt is preoccupying the country with an internal bloody anti-terror conflict that would prevent any concrete Egyptian contribution to the stabilization of the Arab Levant or support to the Palestinians in their struggle to end the Israeli occupation of their land, let alone the fact that this presence is already pitting Egypt against Israel's archenemy, Hamas, in the Palestinian Gaza Strip and creating a hostile environment that dictates closer Egyptian-Israeli security coordination.
Therefore, Israel is not going to "interfere" because "these are internal issues of the countries where it is happening." Israel is "informally ready to render assistance, but not in a military way and not by joining the (U.S.-led) coalition" against the IS, according to the deputy head of the Israeli embassy in Moscow, Olga Slov, as quoted by Russian media on November 14.
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