European officials warn of higher terror risk over holiday season

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German and French security officials are warning of a heightened risk of Islamist terror attacks during the Christmas and Hanukkah holidays by young “lone wolves” radicalised by Israel’s war against Hamas. 

“The danger is real and greater than it has been for a long time,” said Thomas Haldenwang, head of the Bundesverfassungsschutz (BfV), Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, in a statement.

Officials said the support Hamas was now receiving from terror organisations such as al-Qaeda and Islamic State was a significant factor in the increased threat level.

Nicolas Lerner, head of France’s domestic intelligence agency, the DGSI, noted in an interview with Le Monde that IS traditionally “has an aversion to nationalist causes” such as that of Hamas but was now actively calling for solidarity with its “Palestinian brothers”.

Europe has been bracing itself for violence since Hamas launched a bloody rampage on October 7 and Israel responded with a bombardment and invasion of Gaza.

Wars in the Middle East have often had spillover effects in Europe, especially in countries with large Muslim and Jewish populations like France and Germany.

In an unusual six-page public statement last week, Haldenwang said the risk of Islamist attack has long been high in Germany, but the unprecedented way al-Qaeda and IS had “latched on” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had given that threat level a “new quality”.

Meanwhile, the “flood of digital images on social media” showing the war in Gaza was eliciting a “highly emotional response” from young people, some of whom had become more receptive to the violent messaging of terror groups.

“This can lead to the radicalisation of perpetrators, acting alone, who attack ‘soft targets’ with primitive means,” he said.    

Europe has already seen an uptick in such attacks since the Hamas attack. A 20-year-old man of Chechen origin stabbed a high-school teacher to death in the northern French town of Arras on October 13. Three days later, a Tunisian man shot dead two Swedish football fans in Brussels.

Then on December 3, a German tourist walking near the Eiffel Tower was slain in a gruesome knife and hammer attack by a 26-year-old Franco-Iranian man who had previously served four years in jail for plotting a terror strike.

He told the police who arrested him that he “could no longer bear . . . to see Muslims die, in Afghanistan and in Palestine”, according to the French interior minister Gérald Darmanin.

The attack highlighted the thorny issue of what to do with people convicted of terror offences who are eligible for release from prison: in France, some 380 have been released since 2018, and a cohort of about 35 was expected next year. German police have in the past six weeks arrested four men on suspicion of preparing attacks, one allegedly on a pro-Israel demonstration, the three others on Christmas markets.

Lerner of the DGSI noted that the profile of the attackers was getting younger. He said the three terrorist plots uncovered by the DGSI this year “all involved individuals under the age of 20”, with the youngest 13 and two others aged 14.

German and French security officials highlight that in previous waves of terror attacks, Islamist radicals were easier to identify because of their affiliation with certain well-known mosques.

“But young Muslims are now becoming radicalised in their own internet bubbles, and that makes them much harder to detect,” said one German official.

So far, German authorities have recorded 4,300 criminal acts connected to the Middle East conflict since October 7, 500 of them acts of violence, Nancy Faeser, the German interior minister, announced on Thursday.

Some in Europe worry the recent attacks could presage a repeat of the terrorist outrages that swept through Paris in 2015, and Nice, Brussels and Berlin in 2016.

France has been on its highest alert for terror attacks since October 13, when the knifeman struck in Arras. On Sunday, Darmanin asked local prefects to increase security measures and exercise “extreme vigilance” at synagogues ahead of the Jewish holidays.

But there are big differences between today and a decade ago. Several of the perpetrators in the Bataclan and Brussels attacks had travelled to Syria to fight with IS, while the recent incidents in Paris and Arras have been “isolated and homegrown” and “not projected from the Middle East”, said Hugo Micheron, an expert on jihadism in Europe.

He said that didn’t diminish the threat the younger radicals posed. “The permissive environment is bigger with the rise of social networks where extreme messages are reaching young people,” he said.