Islamic State 'no real threat' to Israel

An Israeli security expert has said that the Islamic State group poses no fundamental threat to Israel, explaining that the group barely makes the top five threats to the Jewish state.

"Daesh is in roughly fifth place on the list of threats to Israel," said Amos Yadlin, military analyst and chief of Israel's Institute for National Security Studies (INSS).

Speaking on Saturday, the security expert explained that Hamas and Hizballah posed a bigger threat to Israel's security, with Iran posing the biggest existential threat to the state.

This statement follows the release of an article by the Islamic State group explaining why they have not attacked Israel. The explanation was published in the group's Dabiq online newspaper on March 15.

"If we look at the reality of the world today", the article said, "we will find that it is completely ruled by polytheism and its laws, except for the regions where Allah made it possible for the Islamic State to establish the religion... Therefore, jihad in Palestine is equal to jihad elsewhere,"

The article also went on to criticise the Arab "exaggerators" who have forwarded the idea that "Palestine is the Muslims' primary cause."

In issuing this apologia of sorts, the IS group seems to allude to widespread opposition to the group within the Arab and Muslim world due to its killing of thousands of Muslims.

Since its inception, the majority of the IS group's victims have been those of the Islamic faith, with a UN report from 2014 finding that IS was the "primary actor" responsible for the killing of 9,347 Iraqi civilians in the first eight months of that year.

The IS group's lack of interest in Israel will perhaps not be a huge cause for concern in Palestine, where a study by the Pew Research Centre in 2015 found that 84% of Palestinians oppose the militant group.

Despite the pressures and persecution faced by Palestinians at the hands of Israel, support for the IS group remains low, with the Palestinian territories showing the fourth highest levels of opposition to the group out of the eleven countries surveyed.