(Bloomberg) — Since the conflict between Israel and Hamas flared anew two years ago, UK security officials have braced for the bloodshed to spread into local streets. On Thursday — Yom Kippur — the violence finally struck Britain’s Jewish community.
The attack on the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue in Manchester was the deadliest domestic terrorist attack since 2020. The assailant — identified by police as a 35-year-old British citizen of Syrian descent — drove a vehicle at the temple and then attacked worshipers with a knife, recalling a spate of car-ramming and stabbing attacks in 2017 and 2019.
While counterterrorism police have not explained Jihad Al-Shamie’s motives or his path to a fatal standoff with armed police this week, the incident has crystallized concern building in the British security services since Oct. 7, 2023. The risk that local residents — inspired by Hamas or radicalized over Israel’s military response in Gaza — would resort to violence has long been considered high in a country with deep links to the Middle Eastern conflict and the Israeli government.
“We are powerfully alive to the risk that events in the Middle East directly trigger terrorist action in the UK,” Ken McCallum, director-general of the domestic security service MI5, said in a speech last year.
Security officials are concerned by what they see as the unquantifiable potential radicalizing effects on thousands of people in Britain, especially young people, of watching high-resolution videos of people being killed in Gaza every day. That poses both an immediate threat and the danger of what McCallum has called “slower-burn radicalization.”
Pro-Palestinian rallies have become a regular occurrence in London and many other cities, with Muslims comprising 6.5% of the population of England and Wales as of 2021. Although the marches have been mostly peaceful, opponents have complained about intimidation of passers-by and antisemitic banners and slogans.
Another rally is planned for London’s Trafalgar Square on Saturday. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government, which just last month recognized a Palestinian state in a bid to put pressure on Israel to end its military campaign, has called on the organizer, Defend our Juries, to cancel the demonstration.
Reports of antisemitism against Jews, who represent 0.5% of the population, reached a record high last year. Incidents of Islamophobia have increased, as well, and provided an undercurrent to a wave anti-migrant riots in the summer of 2024. Some 75% of UK counterterror activity relates to Islamist extremism, with the other 25% focused on extreme right-wing terrorism, according to data published by MI5 last year.
Anti-terror police have disrupted several alleged plots targeting Jews over the past year. Two men are due to face trial later this month charged with planning to carry out an Islamic State-inspired gun attack on the Jewish community in the northwest of England, where Manchester is located.
Police are continuing to investigate an alleged plot targeting the Israeli embassy in London earlier this year. In 2024, a Moroccan asylum-seeker was jailed for killing a 70-year-old man in a terror attack inspired by the Gaza war.
“It is the responsibility of government and we will rise to that challenge and do all that we can to absolutely ensure that our Jewish community is safe and secure,” Starmer told a gathering of Manchester first-responders on Friday.
Although he has promised extra police protection for Jewish sites, critics note that the Manchester synagogue already had gates and government-subsidized security and say more action is needed to counter antisemitism broadly.
A shift in the nature of terrorism from organized cells and larger terror groups toward lone actors means new challenges for anti-terror police. Some successful recent terrorist incidents have been carried out by people who were not on the security services’ radar and acted alone, often after suddenly becoming radicalized to the point of violence by material found online.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood told Sky News on Friday that Al-Shamie had not been referred to the government’s anti-terror program known as Prevent. But counterterrorism police later said that Al-Shamie was facing an investigation for rape allegations and was free on bail.
“We believe Al-Shamie may have been influenced by extreme Islamist ideology,” Head of Counter Terrorism Policing Laurence Taylor said in a statement. “Establishing the full circumstances of the attack is likely to take some time.”
As of Friday evening, police had arrested six others in the wake the Manchester attack on suspicion of commission, preparation and instigation of acts of terrorism.
The case hints at the messy picture confronting counterterrorism agents when it comes to finding would-be terrorists with a limited grasp of their stated causes, often with mental-health problems and personal grievances. For all those complexities, the online world is central to both the threat and countering it, hence the UK’s ongoing efforts to circumvent encryption for terror suspects, sparking a fight with Apple, Inc. and the US.
Security officials are also concerned by efforts from Al-Qaeda and in particular Islamic State Khorasan Province to use the conflict in Gaza to export their ideologies to Britain once again. The UK might have expected to see more Gaza-related violence, if it wasn’t for Al-Qaeda and Islamic State focusing their attention on other conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, one official said.
That is in danger of changing as those groups seek to use images from the Middle East to encourage people to carry out terrorist acts in Britain. In the past two years, a man in Coventry was jailed for life for designing an armed drone for Islamic State and two brothers in Birmingham were convicted of attempting to join ISKP.
Home Office officials see links between the conflict in Gaza and broader unrest on British streets. A government official said that pro-Palestine demonstrations too often cross the line into criminality, citing the arrest of some 40 people at pro-Palestine protests on the evening after the synagogue attack, including six charged with assaulting police officers.
Such displays are used by far-right groups to organize their own demonstrations, such as a 110,000-strong rally held in the capital by activist the activist Tommy Robinson last month. While Starmer criticized that march for trying to “drag our country down into a toxic spiral of division and hatred” and branded leading Gaza protest organizer, Palestine Action, as a terrorist group, his government is caught in the middle.
But it’s the information people get online, much of it false or distorted, that security officials say has made attacks like Thursday’s both more likely and harder to prevent.
“Sadly, we’ve long known about, and struggled to combat, the power of what people see online in radicalizing minds, especially young minds,” former Cabinet Secretary Simon Case told Bloomberg in an interview. “We will probably be living with the online reverberations of Hamas’s attack and the Israeli response for many years to come.”
–With assistance from Alex Morales, William Standring, Siraj Datoo and Myles Miller.
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