Members of the Lions’ Den marched through the West Bank Askar refugee camp in Nablus in an armed military parade in early December last year. Two months earlier, the Israeli Prime Minister brushed the group off as only having 30 members and being disorganized, vowing to “get his hands on them.” Israel proclaimed the Lion’s Den was defeated after killing many of the group’s influential leaders, but this has only inspired more Palestinian youth to join the group. In early December, the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate, Aman submitted the first security assessment outlook for 2023 to a conference held by the Gazit Institute, a military research institute of the Israeli government. According to reports Head of the research department at Aman, Brigadier General Amit Saar stated that the establishment of the Lion’s Den is a disappointment to the security state, and Israel has failed to “quell their motive to fight.” Saar added. "We see young men born after the outbreak of the second intifada, rebelling against everything, even against the Palestinian Authority.” During the Lions Den’s armed parade in Nablus, one of their members stated, “the Lion’s Den belongs to all of Palestine without exception. We believe in the unity of blood and struggle. We are members of all Palestinian factions and the sons of the two uprisings the colonists are delusional to assume we are defeated.”
Aman is no ordinary government agency, and the fact that the Lion’s Den has gained their attention is a testament to how seriously the Israeli government is taking the Lion’s Den and other resistance groups. Aman controls the Israeli secret prison in northern Israel that houses prisoners considered to be high-risk, known publicly as Camp 1391. Camp 1391 is often referred to as “Israel’s Guantanamo.” Aman controls Unit 8200, a youth cyber group consisting of teens and twenty-year-olds recruited from high school after school programs to run the Israelis Signal Intelligence Unit, spying on Israeli and occupied territories for intel, much like the NSA in the United States. Aman also controls Unit 81 and provides Israeli soldiers and spies with cutting-edge technologies, SIGINT, and decryption. Why is Israel discounting and brushing aside the current Palestinian Resistance while one of Israel’s top intelligence agencies mentions the Lion’s Den in the same sentence as Hezbollah and Iran at a security conference in early December 2022?
