Israel to strip ISIS fighters of citizenship
Interior Minister Deri says amendment to law will enable stripping Israeli nationals who left fight for ISIS of their Israeli citizenship; 20 already stripped of citizenship, all but two Arab.
Interior Minister Aryeh Deri said Wednesday an amendment to Israel's nationality act that went into force this month allows those engaged in hostile activity to be stripped of their citizenship in absentia.
"I asked that the citizenship of 20 such Israelis be revoked," he told Israeli Army Radio.
The Shin Bet security service has in the past estimated that several dozen Israeli nationals had been fighting for ISIS in Iraq and Syria but now says that "about 20" remain active.
The remainder, it says, were either killed in action or returned to Israel, where they were arrested.
Deri said that the amendment would prevent ISIS recruits from returning to the country, while also acting as a deterrent to young Israelis considering similar journeys.
Without the bill, he said, they would return to the country and eventually "carry out another car ramming attack."
He said each individual decision would receive due process.
Israeli TV Channel 2 reported Tuesday that most of those to be stripped of their citizenship were Arabs.
However, it said, two were originally Jews—immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union who had converted to Islam and joined the fighting in Syria.
The Shin Bet has said that ISIS sympathizers among the Jewish state's Arab minority pose a "serious security threat" for Israel.
By the end of 2016, 83 people, most of them Arab Israelis, were behind bars in Israel as suspected ISIS sympathizers, up from just 12 a year earlier, according a recent report.
Some were arrested for planning to travel to Syria or Iraq to fight alongside the jihadists, or on their return to Israel.
Others were detained for contacts on the internet with ISIS militants abroad or for planning attacks at home.
