Israel’s war with Hamas is also Europe’s war

The fight against Hamas is not just Israel’s struggle, but it is Europe’s struggle, too. Beyond the disturbing pro-Palestine marches that have taken place across the continent since the October 7 attacks, there is something even uglier festering and manifesting on the streets of cities in Europe. Hamas is expanding their terror campaign and coordinating cross-border operations on European soil. The predominant targets are all too familiar – innocent Jewish civilians, Jewish places of worship, and Israeli institutions. But the emerging network structures are novel, and they resemble an approach also being employed by the Iranian regime in Europe: the hiring of and collaborating with local criminal gangs to conduct terror plots.

Between October 7, 2023, and June 7, 2024, there have been at least 79 individuals apprehended for involvement in Islamist terror plots in Europe. Among these cases number two typologies of violence: direct and coordinated. In other words, some nefarious actors take it upon themselves to act out terror attacks as lone wolves, while others undertake a concerted effort to form cells and to plan more elaborate attacks, often against more ambitious targets, such as highly securitized venues. The Islamic State-Khorasan Province attack against Crocus City Hall in Moscow in March 2024 being a case in point.

The targets of Islamist attacks range consistently from synagogues, churches, Jewish individuals, Jewish schools, to infidels, blasphemers, and institutions that represent Israeli interests or other institutions deemed antithetical to the Islamist extremist’s ideological convictions. However, the number of suspects that explicitly claimed to be conducting or planning to execute a terror attack in the name of Hamas is dwarfed by the number that claimed they had allegiances to other Islamist terror groups, most commonly Islamic State and its central Asian variant, Islamic State- Khorasan Province. Nevertheless, while the number of Islamic State attacks plotted may be greater, the threat now posed by Hamas to Europe is becoming increasingly a serious one.

The direct form of violence that caused the deadliest outcome involved a perpetrator motivated by events in Gaza and who also had links to organized crime. The perpetrators name was Abdelssalem Lassoued, a Tunisian man who killed two Swedish civilians with an AR-15 Assault Rifle on October 17, 2023, in Brussels. The investigation that followed the perpetrator’s attack uncovered that he had issued a statement shortly prior to the attack, in which he declared his desire to avenge the killing of Palestinians in Gaza. There is no confirmed link between Lassoued and Hamas, but clearly Lassoued was inspired by Hamas. That he took it upon himself to respond para-militaristically to events in Gaza surely demonstrates this, when he waged an act of warfare on the streets of Brussels. That is not to say that Lassoued would not have executed the attack if the war in Gaza had not begun, but rather it is evidence that Hamas’s actions on October 7 have been a catalyst for terrorists to conduct attacks internationally. In the case of Lassoued, Hamas’s actions provided him with a rationale to kill innocent civilians. His motivations and ensuing method of violence were inspired by the war Hamas waged on Israel on October 7.

Furthermore, Lassoued’s actions represented both a permutation and an extension of Hamas operations to the European theater. Lassoued was also connected to a Moroccan drug smuggler known as Kamal Afouallah, who was arrested on October 27, 2023 in Malaga, Spain. Afouallah and Lassoued had been associates in organized crime. The warrant for Afouallah’s arrest had been issued by Belgian authorities and carried out by Spanish national police. The reasons for the arrest warrant were that Afouallah was suspected of collaborating in the planning of the terror plot in Brussels. He was accused of deliberately withholding information prior to the fact, and of falsifying documents for Lassoued. Furthermore, the Brussels attack was one of the few successfully completed attacks, according to my original dataset of Islamist plots in Western Europe from October 7, 2023 to June 7, 2024.

However, beyond the Hamas-inspired lone wolf typology of violence, there is another serious and arguably more dangerous development gaining traction, one that should come as a great concern to the national security apparatus in Europe. Hamas has been establishing extensive operational networks in Europe. And it is doing so by recruiting gang members, with Hamas agents serving as operational nodes within the crime-terror nexus forming under the banner of the Palestinian terrorist organisation. In December 2023, a cell with direct links to Hamas’s command leadership was broken up. The cell comprised of gang members from the Danish street gang Loyal to Familia, as well as Hamas operatives based in several European countries, such as Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. The Hamas-Loyal to Familia network in these countries liaised with Hamas leadership officials based in the West Bank and Lebanon.

The collaboration between Hamas and Loyal to Familia was established by an unnamed Hamas military operative based in the European Union. The suspect belongs to Hamas’s West Bank Sector. It is unclear which country in the European Union he operated from when forming this axis, but his connections run through Adnan Alhaj Kassem, a Hamas member based in Sweden, and further up the chain of command, through Khalil Al Kharraz, the now-deceased Deputy Commander of Hamas’s military wing in Lebanon. This indicates that the initiative to establish links with Loyal to Familia originated from the Hamas command structure.

A flow chart published by the Israeli government in January 2024 shows that Al Kharraz operated directly under four other senior Hamas officials. At the top of the Command structure was Saleh-Al-Arouri, Deputy Leader of Hamas’s Political Bureau; Zaher Jabarin, Deputy Leader of Hamas in the West Bank; Azzam al-Aqra, senior official at Hamas’s West Bank military wing in Lebanon; and Samir Fandi, Head of Operations at Hamas military wing in Lebanon. Four of the five senior leadership members who led the network have been terminated, but that two of them served in political roles demonstrates that the political wing of Hamas is directly involved in preparing terror plots in Europe, proving that any distinction between political and military entities within Hamas is a fallacy.

In the European theater of operations, there were seven Loyal to Familia gang members operating under the direct command of a senior member with disclosed links to Hamas. The names of the Loyal to Familia members coordinating with Hamas have not been disclosed, but there were seven of them in total. In the German cell, there were three Hamas operatives working under the network. They are Abdelhamid El Ali, Ibrahim Elrassalmi, and Mohamed Bassiouny. The Hamas operative in the Netherlands, Nazir Rustom, was a veteran member of the terror group and appears to have served as a conduit between the Hamas leaders presiding over the network from the West Bank and Lebanon, and the operatives in Europe.

Rustom’s portfolio included raising finances for Hamas in Western Europe, which he did under the guise of his role as secretary for a charity organization that claimed to raise money for Palestinian refugees known as the Rotterdam-based foundation International Support Directly to the Poor (ISRAA). According to NL Times and De Telegraaf, this organization was a Hamas front, and Rustom was able to raise up to six million euros for Hamas during his time in the Netherlands. He, and individuals that made up the Hamas cell in Germany, have all been arrested.

In total, ten members of this Hamas-led crime-terror network have been arrested, and the network’s planned coordinated attacks have been foiled. Their targets have been described by the relevant authorities as Jewish institutions across Denmark, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. The language used to describe the threat level suggests that the plots were at an advanced stage. As Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen stated, the Hamas threat was “as serious as it gets.” Acknowledging the terror threat Hamas poses to Europe is certainly a step in the right direction. However, acknowledging that the threat risks becoming graver is a crucial step towards combating it. Judging by the international scale of the network, had the attacks been successfully executed, the number of Jewish casualties would have been considerable. It is, after all, Hamas’s objective to inflict mass Jewish casualties.

Considering the revelation about Hamas fundraising operations in Europe, the intelligence community must coordinate more closely with law enforcement and intensify their efforts to intervene in known Hamas operatives’ own efforts to conduct subversive activities, such as exploiting loopholes in the law enabling Hamas to generate large financial resources for their global terror plots. Hamas relies on these financial resources to be able to hire their criminal gang affiliates. Without those funds, Hamas’s ability to recruit criminal gangs would be frustrated. Efforts to target lines of communication between Hamas leaders in the Middle East and their European subordinates must also be intensified. Targeting Hamas’s ability to recruit through charities and other organizational fronts in Europe would complicate Hamas coordination on the ground. More closely monitoring these organizations would also provide authorities with the ability to stem the flow of Islamist operatives infiltrating into Europe, as these organizations are points of contact and facilitate the integration of Hamas members into their European operational enclaves. Additionally, increased policing of criminal gang members who are suspected of harboring Islamist inclinations is also now clearly imperative.

Terror is the defining motivation of all of Hamas’s operations, regardless of whether their senior officials and military brass issue orders from Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, or indeed Europe. What security officials in Europe must heed from this reality is that Hamas’s drive to inflict terror and destruction is a relentless one. Their long history of violent terror in Israel serves as both evidence of Hamas’s modus operandi, and as a warning to Europe. How Hamas has conducted its plots in the Middle East must now focus the minds of European national security circles, if Europe is to prevent from suffering the kind of devastation Hamas has inflicted upon Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East. In other words, Europe is fighting the same enemy as Israel. Therefore, Israel’s war is clearly Europe’s too.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.