ISIS has attacked Israel. The more interesting question is why it has done so relatively rarely despite years of extreme anti-Israel and anti-Jewish rhetoric, operating directly beside Israeli-controlled territory, and carrying out attacks much farther from its main bases.
There is no need to dismiss that question as a conspiracy theory. The pattern is real enough to deserve an explanation.
There is also no need to leap from that anomaly to the conclusion that Israel created ISIS or secretly controlled it.
The evidence points somewhere in between those simplistic answers.
ISIS had strategic reasons to prioritize other enemies. It had limited infrastructure inside Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. It competed ideologically and militarily with Palestinian organizations rather than functioning as their natural ally. Israel was also a comparatively difficult target with formidable military, intelligence, and border defenses.
At the same time, Israel’s conduct during the Syrian civil war complicates any sanitized version of this history. Israel secretly armed and financed Syrian rebel groups. United Nations observers documented repeated interactions between Israeli forces and armed Syrian opposition members across the ceasefire line in the occupied Golan. A former Israeli defense minister publicly said that if forced to choose between Iran and ISIS, he preferred ISIS. The same former minister later said an ISIS affiliate once “opened fire and apologized” to Israel, without explaining how that apology was communicated.
Those facts are worth investigating.
They are not, however, the same thing as evidence that Israel founded, financed, commanded, or maintained a general alliance with ISIS.
The most defensible conclusion is more complicated: Israel and ISIS were enemies, but not always each other’s most important enemy. In the fragmented wars surrounding Israel, their immediate interests occasionally overlapped even while they remained fundamentally hostile actors. Mutual avoidance, tactical restraint, indirect communication, or simultaneous hostility toward the same third party can emerge from those circumstances without requiring a secret alliance.
That distinction explains much of the mystery.
First, the premise is wrong: ISIS really has attacked Israel
Any investigation should begin by correcting the most common version of the claim.
ISIS did not literally leave Israel untouched.
In November 2016, gunmen belonging to an ISIS-linked force on the Syrian side of the occupied Golan fired mortars and small arms at Israeli soldiers. Israeli aircraft subsequently killed four of the fighters. Reuters described direct exchanges between Israeli forces and ISIS-linked gunmen as rare, but the incident itself is well documented.
ISIS’s Sinai Province also repeatedly fired rockets toward Israel. In February 2017, the organization claimed a four-rocket attack on Eilat. Later that month, rockets again came from Sinai toward southern Israel. ISIS claimed another two rockets fired from Sinai in October 2017.
Then, on March 27, 2022, two gunmen killed two Israeli Border Police officers in Hadera. ISIS formally claimed responsibility for the attack through its propaganda apparatus. Reuters and other international reporting confirmed the claim.
There have also been ISIS-inspired individuals, suspected cells, and disrupted plots involving Israel.
So “ISIS has never attacked Israel” is demonstrably false.
But correcting that statement does not make the larger question disappear.
The better question is:
Why has a movement that talks so obsessively about Jews, Jerusalem and Israel devoted comparatively little of its operational capacity to attacking Israel itself?
That is where the analysis becomes more interesting.
The gap between ISIS rhetoric and ISIS behavior is real
ISIS propaganda has repeatedly invoked Jerusalem, Jews, Israel and the liberation of Palestine.
Yet researchers examining years of ISIS and broader global-jihadist activity toward Israel found a persistent discrepancy between rhetoric and operations.
A detailed study published through the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point concluded that Israel and Jewish targets featured heavily in jihadist rhetoric but that this rhetoric only rarely translated into successful operations against Israel. The researchers identified rocket attacks, individual attacks and plots, but nothing resembling the sustained campaigns ISIS waged in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan, Libya or elsewhere.
That research deserves a sourcing caveat: two of its authors were affiliated with Israel’s International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University, and the paper is not politically neutral simply because it is academic. Its chronology of attacks and reproductions of jihadist arguments are nevertheless independently useful and can be checked against other records.
And the broader pattern is difficult to dispute.
ISIS built a proto-state spanning substantial parts of Iraq and Syria. Its branches slaughtered Shiite Muslims, Yazidis, Egyptian Christians, Syrian and Iraqi civilians, Afghan civilians, Taliban members, Egyptian soldiers and police, and many others. Its external operations inspired or directed attacks from Europe to South Asia.
Israel never became a comparable theater of ISIS operations.
The question, therefore, is not invented.
ISIS itself explained part of the reason
One of the strongest pieces of evidence comes from the jihadist movement’s own internal ideological debate.
Global jihadists were repeatedly criticized—including by other Muslims—for claiming that Palestine and Jerusalem were central causes while spending vastly more effort killing Muslims and fighting governments elsewhere.
ISIS-aligned media responded directly to that criticism.
In 2016, an ISIS-supporting publication argued that penetrating Israel was difficult because it was protected by a surrounding military and security “defensive envelope.” It also emphasized that ISIS was already committing enormous resources to the wars in Iraq and Syria. The strategic sequence it described was essentially to establish the Islamic State, destroy nearby hostile governments and rival forces, and eventually reach Palestine from a stronger position.
Other ISIS material similarly rejected the proposition that Palestine had to be the movement’s first battlefield.
This fits a much older jihadist distinction between the “near enemy” and the “far enemy.”
ISIS was attempting to capture territory and govern populations. That meant the Iraqi government, Syrian government, rival insurgents, Kurdish forces, Shiite militias and competing Sunni organizations were immediate obstacles to its project.
Israel was an ideological enemy.
Those actors were operational obstacles standing directly between ISIS and the state it was attempting to build.
Terrorist organizations do not necessarily attack the people they hate most. They attack where ideology, opportunity, logistics, strategic benefit and capability intersect.
Being next door to Israel did not mean ISIS could easily operate inside Israel
A map can make the puzzle look more mysterious than it is.
For years, ISIS or ISIS-linked forces existed in Syria and Sinai, apparently putting them on Israel’s doorstep.
But geographic proximity and operational access are different things.
Israel maintains heavily controlled borders and a large intelligence and internal-security apparatus. Jordan and Egypt also separated ISIS’s principal territorial centers from much of Israel. Inside Gaza, ISIS did not control the territory or its principal armed organizations. In the West Bank, it likewise lacked anything comparable to the infrastructure that Palestinian nationalist organizations had developed over decades.
ISIS could launch rockets from Sinai.
An individual adherent could carry out an attack.
An ISIS-affiliated unit could exchange fire with Israeli troops in Syria.
Building a sustained insurgency inside Israel or the occupied Palestinian territories was a different proposition entirely.
The fact that ISIS successfully attacked softer targets in Iraq, Syria, Libya or Afghanistan while struggling to establish comparable infrastructure against Israel is therefore not, by itself, evidence of a deal with Israel.
ISIS and Hamas are not the same movement—and treating them as interchangeable distorts the story
Another reason the question is often answered badly is that Palestinian armed movements are casually folded into a single category called “Islamic terrorism.”
That is analytically wrong.
Hamas is a Palestinian Islamist-nationalist movement whose political project is centered on Palestine. ISIS rejects nationalism itself in favor of a transnational caliphate.
Their ideological differences are not cosmetic.
ISIS has criticized Hamas over its Palestinian nationalism, political participation, relations with Iran and other practices that ISIS regards as incompatible with its own version of Islam.
Inside Gaza, Hamas has periodically arrested and fought Salafi-jihadist factions sympathetic to ISIS. Some of those factions have launched rockets toward Israel precisely while challenging Hamas’s authority or attempting to provoke a confrontation that Hamas was trying to avoid. Research on these groups found both antagonism and occasional transactional relationships—especially around the Gaza-Sinai economy—but not a simple Hamas-ISIS alliance.
That matters beyond academic terminology.
Palestinian opposition to Israeli occupation is not synonymous with ISIS’s global jihadist project.
Conflating the two can serve a political purpose: it converts a national conflict involving occupation, dispossession, borders, settlements, refugees and Palestinian self-determination into a generic Western “war on terror.”
Whatever one’s judgment of Hamas’s tactics—including attacks on civilians—“Hamas is ISIS” is not a serious description of either organization’s ideology, constituency, objectives or history.
ISIS itself would reject the comparison.
Now for the uncomfortable part: Israel really did secretly support Syrian rebels
This is where an evidence-based investigation has to resist moving in the opposite direction and becoming an Israeli government defense brief.
It is simply false to suggest that every allegation of Israeli cooperation with armed Syrian opposition groups was invented propaganda.
Some of it is documented.
A June 2014 United Nations report from the UN Disengagement Observer Force described repeated activity along the ceasefire line in the occupied Syrian Golan.
UNDOF reported that its personnel frequently observed armed opposition members interacting with the IDF.
During that reporting period alone, UN observers recorded 59 occasions on which armed opposition members transferred 89 wounded people across the ceasefire line to Israeli forces. Israeli forces later returned treated individuals. On one occasion, UN observers also saw the IDF hand two boxes to armed opposition members.
The report does not say what was in those boxes.
More importantly, it does not identify those opposition members as ISIS.
That limitation matters.
Internet discussions frequently take a UN document saying “armed members of the opposition,” add the fact that jihadist organizations were operating in southern Syria, and silently transform the sentence into “the UN caught Israel supplying ISIS.”
The source does not establish that.
But the opposite distortion is equally unacceptable: pretending that Israeli interaction with armed Syrian groups was fictional.
It wasn’t.
Israel’s support went considerably beyond treating wounded Syrians
Later reporting revealed a much larger Israeli operation.
In 2018, Foreign Policy journalist Elizabeth Tsurkov reported, based on interviews with more than two dozen Syrian rebel commanders and fighters, that Israel had secretly armed and financed at least 12 rebel groups in southern Syria.
According to the investigation, Israeli security agencies transferred weapons through crossings in the Israeli-occupied Golan, including assault rifles, machine guns, mortar launchers and vehicles, while also providing money to fighters.
The Wall Street Journal had reported the previous year that Israel was secretly providing cash and assistance to Syrian rebel groups along the Golan frontier.
This was therefore more than humanitarian medicine.
Israel was intervening in the Syrian civil war through armed local proxies.
But there is another crucial part of the Foreign Policy investigation that is frequently removed when the story circulates online:
The rebel groups were reportedly being supported partly to prevent both Iranian-backed forces and Islamic State militants from establishing themselves next to Israel’s border.
In other words, the best available evidence establishes a covert Israeli program to arm Syrian rebels.
It does not establish that the program was an ISIS support operation.
Those are different claims.
Israel nevertheless had a strategic reason to fear Iran more than ISIS
This is one of the most important facts for understanding why the relationship sometimes looked strange.
Israel did not necessarily rank every hostile armed actor according to how extreme its ideology was.
It ranked threats according to Israeli strategic interests.
In January 2016, then-Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon made the hierarchy unusually explicit.
Asked about Iran and ISIS, he said:
“If I had to choose between Iran and ISIS — I prefer ISIS.”
His explanation was that Iran represented the more powerful and durable strategic threat, particularly because of Tehran’s relationship with Hezbollah and the Syrian government. Ya’alon simultaneously predicted that ISIS’s territorial state would eventually be defeated.
Years earlier, outgoing Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren had publicly described Iranian-aligned forces in Syria as more dangerous to Israel than Sunni forces opposed to Iran.
That does not mean “Israel supported ISIS.”
It means something subtler and much more believable:
Israeli policymakers could regard ISIS as an enemy while simultaneously regarding Iran, Hezbollah and the Syrian government as the more important enemies.
That distinction is standard statecraft.
During a multi-sided war, Enemy A can benefit when Enemy B attacks Enemy C without Enemy A controlling B.
And that appears to have happened repeatedly in Syria.
Every Syrian government unit, Hezbollah fighter or Iranian-backed militia occupied fighting ISIS or other Sunni rebels was a unit not available for another mission.
Conversely, every ISIS position destroyed by rival rebels or other forces also reduced a potential threat to Israel.
Israel therefore had reason to shape the battlefield rather than simply divide everyone into “friend” and “enemy.”
That is not morally clean.
Geopolitics rarely is.
But it is different from a puppet-master theory.
Then there is the extraordinary story about ISIS “apologizing” to Israel
One episode understandably fuels suspicion more than almost any other.
In April 2017, Ya’alon—by then a former defense minister—discussed Israel’s deterrence policy toward armed groups in Syria.
Referring to the November 2016 clash between Israeli troops and an ISIS-affiliated force, Ya’alon said:
“Daesh opened fire and apologized.”
His office was subsequently asked how ISIS had communicated an apology to Israel.
It refused to explain.
The Israeli military also declined to elaborate.
That is genuinely unusual.
It should not be written out of the story merely because it is inconvenient.
At minimum, Ya’alon’s statement suggests that some message attributed to the ISIS-linked force reached the Israeli side, directly or through an intermediary.
What it does not tell us is how.
Possible mechanisms could range from local intermediaries and rebel channels to indirect battlefield communication or intelligence contacts. Without additional evidence, choosing among them would be speculation.
It is therefore fair to say:
There appears to have been some mechanism through which Israel received an apology attributed to an ISIS affiliate.
It is not fair to say:
That proves ISIS and Israel had a secret alliance.
Communication between enemies is common in warfare. States communicate with hostile organizations through intelligence channels, intermediaries, tribal networks, foreign governments and local commanders.
The unexplained communication is evidence of contact.
It is not, standing alone, evidence of control.
Mutual avoidance does not require a secret nonaggression treaty
This distinction is particularly useful when analyzing the recurring claim that Israel and ISIS must have had an unwritten agreement not to attack one another.
An explicit pact is one possible explanation for mutual restraint.
It is not the only one.
Imagine two armed actors, A and B.
A dislikes B.
B dislikes A.
But both are currently fighting C, which each considers a more urgent threat.
Attacking one another would consume ammunition, personnel, intelligence resources and territory while allowing C to benefit.
Neither A nor B needs to sign anything for both sides to independently avoid unnecessary confrontation.
Economists might describe the result as an equilibrium.
Military strategists might call it deconfliction, deterrence or prioritization.
Ordinary observers may mistake it for friendship.
In Syria, Israel concentrated heavily on Iran, Hezbollah and weapons transfers, while ISIS concentrated heavily on capturing and governing Muslim-majority territory and defeating the forces immediately obstructing that goal.
For periods of time, both could rationally prefer not to open another front with each other.
That is a reasonable inference from their behavior.
It is not proof of a backroom agreement.
But didn’t Israel benefit from ISIS?
Sometimes, yes.
That should be stated plainly.
ISIS devastated Syria and Iraq, fought Hezbollah, attacked Iranian interests, weakened the Syrian state and consumed the resources of actors Israel regarded as major strategic adversaries.
Those outcomes could benefit Israel strategically even though ISIS itself posed a danger.
Ya’alon’s preference for ISIS over an Iranian-dominated Syria makes that threat hierarchy explicit.
But benefiting from another actor’s behavior is not evidence that you created that actor.
Iran and the United States both fought ISIS in Iraq despite remaining adversaries.
The United States and the Soviet Union both fought Nazi Germany despite their profound political hostility.
Hamas and Israel have, at different moments in their histories, made tactical decisions influenced by the existence of common or competing enemies without thereby becoming allies.
Multi-sided conflicts constantly produce temporary overlaps of interest.
The correct analytical question is not “Did Israel ever benefit from ISIS?”
It clearly could.
The stronger question is:
Is there evidence that Israel exercised material or organizational control over ISIS?
That is a much higher bar—and the available evidence does not presently meet it.
Testing the claim that Israel created ISIS
A claim this serious should not be rejected merely because Israel denies it.
Governments conduct covert operations.
Intelligence services lie.
States routinely conceal relationships with proxy forces.
History contains many operations that were dismissed before documents, witnesses or investigations eventually established what happened.
So an official denial has little evidentiary value by itself.
Instead, we can test the hypothesis recursively.
What would we expect to find if Israel created or controlled ISIS?
If ISIS were substantially an Israeli intelligence project, especially one that grew into a transnational organization controlling millions of people and enormous territory, we would reasonably expect at least some convergence of evidence over time:
- credible testimony from senior defectors or captured leaders;
- financial or logistical records connecting Israeli institutions to ISIS’s central structure;
- weapons or supply chains demonstrating systematic Israeli provisioning specifically to ISIS;
- communications demonstrating command, coordination or strategic tasking;
- corroborating intelligence from hostile governments that extends beyond accusation;
- organizational records inconsistent with ISIS’s documented independent development;
- or a battlefield pattern showing Israel systematically protecting ISIS from destruction.
A perfect signed contract marked MOSSAD–ISIS AGREEMENT is obviously not required.
Covert relationships are normally established through cumulative evidence.
The problem is that, after more than a decade of extraordinary scrutiny of ISIS, such a body of evidence has not emerged publicly.
Instead, the organization’s own history points in another direction.
ISIS has a traceable organizational history that predates its “caliphate”
ISIS did not suddenly materialize in Syria in 2014.
Its organizational ancestry can be traced through Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s jihadist network, Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Mujahideen Shura Council and the Islamic State of Iraq before Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi expanded the organization into Syria and announced what became ISIS.
A RAND study conducted with researchers from Princeton and West Point examined more than 140 internal documents from al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State of Iraq dating from 2005 to 2010.
Those records reveal an actual bureaucratic organization: payroll systems, personnel management, provincial structures, local revenue collection, financial accounting and internal reporting years before the 2014 caliphate declaration.
That evidence matters because it does not require accepting Israeli statements about ISIS’s origins.
The group’s own records demonstrate organizational continuity.
There is a documented lineage.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq is a much better-supported part of the ISIS origin story
Rejecting the claim that Mossad secretly created ISIS should not become an exercise in absolving Western governments of responsibility.
There is a far stronger evidence-based argument that U.S. policy helped create the conditions in which ISIS became possible.
Zarqawi had organized jihadists before the 2003 invasion.
But the U.S.-led destruction of Saddam Hussein’s government transformed the environment in which his movement operated.
The invasion shattered the Iraqi political order. The occupation’s de-Ba’athification policies and dissolution of major state institutions contributed to enormous instability and Sunni disenfranchisement. A violent insurgency developed. Sectarian conflict escalated dramatically.
Zarqawi’s organization exploited precisely those fractures.
After Zarqawi pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda in 2004, his network became al-Qaeda in Iraq. After his death, its successors formed the Islamic State of Iraq. The Syrian civil war then provided the territorial and political opening for Baghdadi’s organization to expand across the border.
U.S.-run detention facilities also brought jihadists and former Iraqi regime personnel into prolonged contact. Camp Bucca, in particular, became an important networking environment for men who later occupied significant positions within ISIS.
So there is an important distinction between two meanings of the word “created.”
Did the United States intentionally design ISIS as a terrorist organization and secretly command it?
The evidence does not establish that.
Did the invasion and occupation of Iraq contribute enormously to the political, sectarian and institutional conditions from which ISIS emerged?
There is a substantial historical case that they did.
The second proposition does not require a conspiracy.
Sometimes disastrous policy produces an outcome that no one needed to plan in advance.
The documented Israeli campaign against ISIS also matters
Any hypothesis that Israel secretly controlled ISIS also has to account for cases in which Israel actually fought it.
The 2016 Golan exchange is one example: ISIS-linked fighters attacked Israeli troops, and Israeli aircraft killed four of them.
The much larger counterexample occurred in Egypt.
A 2018 New York Times investigation, based on American and British officials, reported that Israel had secretly conducted more than 100 airstrikes inside Egypt using unmarked aircraft, drones and helicopters, with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s approval.
The targets were ISIS-affiliated militants in Sinai.
Human Rights Watch later noted the reporting on Israeli participation in strikes against ISIS-affiliated forces as part of its extensive investigation into abuses committed during Egypt’s Sinai counterinsurgency.
Egypt publicly denied the Times account, so the details should be treated as well-sourced investigative reporting rather than an officially acknowledged Israeli operation.
But if the reporting is correct, Israel was not merely occasionally firing at ISIS.
It conducted a substantial covert air campaign against an ISIS branch.
That is difficult to reconcile with a simple theory in which ISIS operated as an Israeli proxy.
It does not logically make secret contacts impossible.
It strongly weakens the larger claim of Israeli control.
What about the claim that Edward Snowden proved Mossad created ISIS?
This particular allegation is easier to evaluate because it makes a specific documentary claim.
Beginning in 2014, stories circulated saying Edward Snowden had revealed a joint American, British and Israeli intelligence operation—often called “Hornet’s Nest” or “Beehive”—that deliberately created ISIS.
No such Snowden document has been produced.
Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who received Snowden’s files, explicitly rejected the claim. Snowden’s attorney Ben Wizner also described it as a hoax. Investigations tracing the story found that the allegation circulated through unsourced articles rather than originating in an authenticated Snowden disclosure.
That does not mean the Snowden files contain nothing embarrassing about Israel.
Quite the opposite.
Authentic Snowden documents revealed extensive NSA cooperation and intelligence sharing with Israeli services.
But those authentic disclosures should not be mixed with a document that nobody has been able to produce.
Skepticism toward intelligence agencies does not require believing every allegation made about them.
In fact, serious skepticism requires the opposite.
So was there an unwritten Israel-ISIS alliance?
There is currently insufficient evidence to say there was.
But that answer needs several qualifications.
There is evidence that:
Israel interacted with armed Syrian opposition groups.
Verified by UN observers.
Israel covertly armed and financed Syrian rebel factions.
Strongly supported by independent reporting.
Israeli leaders sometimes considered Iran and Hezbollah more threatening than ISIS.
Explicitly acknowledged by senior Israeli officials.
An Israeli former defense minister said an ISIS affiliate apologized after attacking Israeli forces.
Verified as a statement by Ya’alon; the communication mechanism remains unexplained.
ISIS and Israel sometimes avoided direct confrontation despite operating near each other.
Observable from the battlefield record.
But there is not credible public evidence establishing:
Israeli creation of ISIS’s central organization.
Israeli command or control of ISIS.
Systematic Israeli financing of ISIS as an organization.
A formal or durable Israeli-ISIS alliance.
Those stronger conclusions require evidence that the currently available record does not supply.
Why the “ISIS never attacks Israel” story remains so persuasive
Because it combines several true observations into a conclusion that goes farther than the evidence.
The true observations are:
ISIS devoted surprisingly little operational effort to Israel.
Israel benefited strategically when Sunni insurgents weakened Syria, Iran or Hezbollah.
Israel covertly supported armed Syrian opposition groups.
Israeli officials explicitly regarded Iran as the greater strategic threat.
ISIS and Israel sometimes operated close to one another without fighting.
An ISIS affiliate apparently communicated an apology after one clash.
Governments and intelligence services do conduct secret relationships.
Put those facts together quickly and a covert alliance can appear obvious.
But recursive analysis also requires asking what evidence points against the hypothesis.
ISIS did attack Israel.
ISIS affiliates fired rockets at Israeli communities.
ISIS-linked fighters directly attacked Israeli troops.
Israel killed ISIS fighters.
Israel reportedly conducted more than 100 covert strikes against ISIS’s Sinai branch.
Israel reportedly armed Syrian rebels partly to prevent ISIS from reaching its frontier.
ISIS’s internal organizational development can be traced through predecessor organizations going back years before the Syrian war.
Once those facts are added, the simple puppet theory becomes considerably harder to sustain.
The more interesting explanation is not friendship. It is priorities.
The record makes considerably more sense if we abandon the assumption that every conflict has only two sides.
Israel, ISIS, Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, the Syrian government, Syrian rebels, Egypt, the United States, Russia, Turkey and various Kurdish forces were not arranged into two permanent teams.
They operated within overlapping conflicts.
At different moments:
- enemies shared enemies;
- allies competed;
- governments armed groups they did not fully trust;
- hostile actors communicated indirectly;
- states tolerated one threat because another looked more dangerous;
- insurgents postponed one battlefield because another offered greater strategic value.
Israel could hate ISIS and prefer it to Iranian domination of Syria.
ISIS could hate Israel and decide that fighting Syrian Muslims, Iraqi Shiites, Kurdish forces or rival Sunnis was more strategically urgent.
Israel could support one Syrian rebel faction fighting Assad while simultaneously bombing an ISIS faction.
Hamas could fight Israel while also arresting ISIS sympathizers in Gaza.
None of that is contradictory once the region is analyzed as a multi-actor strategic system rather than a morality play.
The answer
ISIS does attack Israel—but much less than its propaganda and geographic proximity might lead people to expect.
The strongest available explanation is a combination of strategy and capability.
ISIS prioritized creating and defending its territorial project in Muslim-majority countries. It concentrated on nearby governments, rival armed factions and populations it wanted to control. Israel was difficult to penetrate, ISIS had weak organizational infrastructure among Palestinians, and existing Palestinian movements competed with rather than naturally submitted to ISIS.
Israeli deterrence likely mattered as well.
But there is an additional geopolitical layer that should not be sanitized.
Israel’s overriding concern in Syria was often Iran, Hezbollah and the survival of an Iranian-aligned military presence on its frontier. Israeli officials openly acknowledged that hierarchy of threats. Israel secretly funded and armed Syrian rebel factions, interacted with armed opposition forces across the occupied Golan, and apparently received some form of apology after an ISIS-linked force mistakenly or deliberately engaged Israeli troops.
Those facts make simplistic assurances that “Israel and ISIS had absolutely nothing to do with one another” too categorical.
Yet moving from those facts to “Israel created ISIS” requires evidence that has not materialized.
The distinction is crucial.
There is credible evidence of overlapping strategic interests, covert Israeli intervention in the Syrian war, contacts with armed opposition actors and at least one unexplained communication involving an ISIS affiliate.
There is not credible evidence establishing that Israel founded, financed or controlled ISIS.
A serious investigation should be willing to say both.
That is not giving Israel the benefit of the doubt.
It is giving the evidence the final word.
References and Further Reading
Primary records and official documentation
- United Nations — Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force, S/2014/401
The primary UN record documenting repeated interactions between Israeli forces and armed Syrian opposition members across the ceasefire line, including transfers of wounded fighters and the observed handover of two boxes. Crucially, it does not identify those opposition members as ISIS. - United Nations Security Council Resolution 497 (1981) — Status of the Syrian Golan Heights
Establishes the international legal context for references in this article to the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan and rejects Israel’s unilateral extension of its law and administration over the territory.
ISIS strategy, operations and Palestinian factions
- Combating Terrorism Center at West Point — “Focus on Israel: In Word and Deed, Global Jihad and the Threat to Israel and the Jewish Community”
Detailed examination of the gap between global-jihadist rhetoric toward Israel and actual attacks, including ISIS arguments explaining why Palestine was not its immediate operational priority. Its authorship and Israeli institutional affiliations should be kept in mind when evaluating analytical conclusions. - CTC Sentinel — “Islamic State Affiliates Press Hamas”
Useful account of the ideological and operational conflict between Hamas and ISIS-aligned Salafi-jihadist factions in Gaza, including rocket attacks by those factions and Hamas crackdowns. - Carnegie Endowment — “Hamas, the Islamic State, and the Gaza-Sinai Crucible”
Explains the complicated mixture of hostility, economic interaction and tactical accommodation between Hamas, Gaza-based Salafi-jihadists and ISIS’s Sinai branch without reducing the relationships to either alliance or total separation.
Documented ISIS attacks involving Israel
- Reuters — Israeli Airstrike Kills Four Islamic State-Linked Gunmen on the Occupied Golan
Documents the November 2016 firefight in which ISIS-linked militants attacked Israeli troops and Israeli aircraft killed four fighters. - Reuters — Islamic State Claims Rockets Fired From Sinai Into Israel
Primary international reporting on ISIS’s claim of responsibility for rocket fire toward southern Israel in 2017. - Reuters reporting — Hadera Attack and ISIS Claim of Responsibility, March 2022
Documents the ISIS-claimed Hadera shooting that killed two Israeli Border Police officers.
Israel’s involvement with Syrian armed groups
- Foreign Policy — “Inside Israel’s Secret Program to Back Syrian Rebels” by Elizabeth Tsurkov
Major independent investigation based on interviews with more than two dozen rebel commanders and fighters, reporting that Israel armed and financed at least 12 Syrian rebel groups. The investigation also reports that the program sought to keep both Iranian-backed forces and ISIS away from Israel’s frontier. - The Wall Street Journal — “Israel Gives Secret Aid to Syrian Rebels”
Earlier reporting documenting Israeli financial and material support to rebel groups operating near the occupied Golan. - Reuters/Ynet — “Ya’alon: In Choice Between Iran and ISIS, I Prefer ISIS”
Important primary-attribution evidence of how a sitting Israeli defense minister ranked ISIS relative to Iran in Israel’s strategic threat hierarchy. - NPR interview with outgoing Israeli ambassador Michael Oren on Syria and Iran
Provides additional contemporary evidence that Israeli policymakers viewed Iranian-aligned forces in Syria as the greater strategic danger.
The ISIS “apology” episode
- Times of Israel — “Ex-Defense Minister Says IS ‘Apologized’ to Israel for November Clash”
Reports Moshe Ya’alon’s statement that ISIS apologized after attacking Israeli forces and notes that his office would not explain how the communication occurred. - The Independent — Report on Ya’alon’s ISIS Apology Statement
Independent corroborating coverage emphasizing both the statement and the refusal to explain the communication channel.
Israel’s campaign against ISIS in Sinai
- The New York Times — “Secret Alliance: Israel Carries Out Airstrikes in Egypt, With Cairo’s O.K.”
Investigation reporting more than 100 covert Israeli airstrikes against ISIS-linked militants in Sinai with Egyptian approval. The operation was not publicly acknowledged by both governments and should therefore be described as extensively sourced reporting rather than an officially confirmed program. - Human Rights Watch — “If You Are Afraid for Your Lives, Leave Sinai!”
Broader investigation into the Sinai conflict that discusses reporting and official indications of Israeli assistance to Egyptian operations against ISIS-affiliated militants.
ISIS origins and organizational development
- RAND Corporation — “Foundations of the Islamic State: Management, Money, and Terror in Iraq, 2005–2010”
Based on more than 140 internal AQI and Islamic State of Iraq documents, providing unusually strong primary-derived evidence for ISIS’s organizational lineage, management structure and finances before its expansion into Syria. - Brookings Institution — “Key Dates in the Rise of the Islamic State (ISIS)”
Clear chronology tracing Zarqawi’s movement through al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State of Iraq into Baghdadi’s ISIS, while showing how the Iraq war and Syrian civil war transformed its opportunities.
The Snowden/Mossad claim
- PolitiFact investigation — “Bloggers: Edward Snowden Leaked NSA Documents Show U.S., Israel Created Islamic State”
Traces the supposed “Hornet’s Nest” disclosure and documents that journalists and representatives with direct access to Snowden’s archive rejected the ISIS-creation attribution. Useful because this particular claim depends on the existence of a specific leaked document that has never been produced. - Institute for Palestine Studies — NSA Documents on U.S.–Israeli Intelligence Cooperation
Useful counterpoint showing that authentic Snowden documents really did reveal extensive U.S.–Israeli intelligence cooperation. Genuine covert relationships should be documented as such rather than used to validate unrelated documents that cannot be authenticated.
Editorial currency note: ISIS and its regional affiliates continue to evolve, and new plots, attacks, intelligence disclosures or declassified records could materially change parts of this assessment. The distinction between confirmed organizational direction, ISIS-inspired violence and attacks merely claimed by ISIS is especially important when evaluating newer incidents.
