A Jerusalem district court has indicted a Palestinian from East Jerusalem on charges of traveling to Syria to join and fight with the Islamic State militant group.
The Shin Bet security service says Khalil Khalil, born in 1990, had joined a gym at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to physically prepare for the mission.
The agency says he told his family he was going on a religious pilgrimage to Mecca, but instead, he and a friend flew to Istanbul in January and then traveled to a safe house in southern Turkey. From there, smugglers brought them to Syria.
Khalil returned after a few weeks and was later arrested by the Shin Bet.
It says about 40 Palestinians and Arab-Israeli citizens have gone to fight with militant groups in Syria.
In January, Maharan Yussuf Khaladi, a-19-year-old Israeli Arab from Nazareth, was charged with joining the Islamic State and fighting with the group in Iraq and Syria.
Khaladi, who was was seriously wounded in Iraq in a coalition airstrike, said in his investigation that he left for Turkey last year after being exposed to Islamic State content on the internet and contacting an IS operative on Facebook.
In December last year, reports emerged that Israeli Arab Ahmed Sharbji infiltrated Syria in 2013 with Rabiya Shahade, 26, who was nicknamed "the Palestinian slayer," and joined the ranks of Islamic State. He was later killed in a fire exchange in Iraq.
According to reports, Shahade, a 26-year-old from Nazareth, left his wife and newborn to join the group. Shahade managed to enter Syira where he too joined the group's ranks and took on the nom de guerre of Abu Musaav Alsafuri. He even sent his family pictures of himself with an Islamic State flag and an RPG missile launcher.