A week before the deadly attack at the Allenby Crossing, the Customs Authority at the Allenby Crossing said that the ISA had warned of lax security arrangements and threats against Israelis staffing the Crossing.
According to the report, the customs officers complained that there were no computerized security scanners at the Allenby Crossing and all work was being done manually, making their work difficult.
In a letter sent by the chairman of the Allenby Crossing Workers' Committee, Yoni Hametz, to the director of the Tax Authority, Shai Aharonovitz, he detailed how the customs officers were facing a thriving smuggling industry, including everything from goods to weapons.
Kan reports that the chairman of the Customs Authority at the Allenby Crossing warned of physical and verbal violence against the workers, as well as of concrete and imminent threats to the workers' lives. "The crossing is guarded by police who are doing their job faithfully, but they are not present all the time and their absence is keenly felt," he wrote. The workers demanded that security arrangements be stepped up, without receiving an immediate response.
A week later, a second letter was drafted, this time by the chairman of the National Customs Workers' Committee, Doron Shazo, in which he wrote that it was unacceptable that customs workers should be exposed to threats on their lives merely because they worked there.
"The solution of turning the turnstile operators into security guards for the threatened workers is not an acceptable solution. The writing is on the wall, we are talking about lives, especially in the sensitive period in which we are in," wrote the chairman of the committee.
The Israel Tax Authority responded: "We have no intention of commenting on intelligence information and security arrangements. However, we would like to emphasize that any incident involving a threat to the safety of employees and human life is being treated with the utmost severity. It should be clarified that there is no connection between the tragic incident at Allenby Bridge and the incidents you mentioned."
Concurrently, 77 Glock pistols were seized Monday night (Monday) from a vehicle that had crossed the Jordanian border. The seizure took place while the border crossings were closed and the two suspects, aged 19 and 22 from the Bedouin sector, were arrested and taken in for questioning.