Israel Police officers on Monday arrested 13 suspects and were checking a suspicious vehicle they stopped on the busy Route 6 highway near the Choreshim interchange.
The Horeshim interchange is in the southern Sharon Plain, close to Shomron.
“All the occupants of the vehicle were detained for questioning,” said the statement, adding that sappers were searching for explosives.
On Sept. 2, Israeli security forces neutralized a car bomb outside the entrance to the Jewish community of Ateret in the Binyamin region of Shomron.
Police and military sappers used a robot to inspect the vehicle, which was carrying two large gas tanks connected to an operating mechanism.
There were no casualties in the incident, which Yisrael Ganz, the head of the Binyamin Regional Council, called a “great miracle.”
Days earlier, the Hamas terrorist group hailed a “double heroic operation” after car bombers wounded three Israelis in the Gush Etzion region of Yehuda.
Last month, Hamas leader abroad Khaled Mashaal called for a return to suicide terrorist attacks against Israelis in Yehuda and Shomron.
During a video address to a conference in Istanbul, Mashaal said, “Resistance operations in the West Bank are escalating despite the harsh conditions,” CNN Arabic reported.
“We want to return to martyrdom operations. This is a situation that can only be addressed by open conflict. They are fighting us with open conflict, and we are confronting them with open conflict,” he continued.
On Aug. 19, the “military” wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad both claimed responsibility for a failed suicide bombing in south Tel Aviv.
In a statement, Hamas vowed to continue to carry out suicide attacks “as long as Israel continues its massacre and policy of assassinations in Gaza.”
(JNS)