FBI says war between Israel and Hamas increases potential for attacks on Americans

The FBI director warned Tuesday that the war between Israel and Hamas had taken the potential for an attack on Americans to a new level and escalated threats against Jews and Muslims in the United States.

Christopher A. Wray, the FBI director, said foreign terrorist organizations had called for violence against Jews after the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas attackers prompted Israel to besiege and bomb the Gaza Strip, where Hamas controls .

“We believe that the actions of Hamas and its allies will serve as an inspiration unlike anything we have seen since ISIS launched its so-called caliphate several years ago,” Mr. Wray told senators from the Department of Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. committee during a hearing on global threats to the United States.

“The ongoing war in the Middle East has taken the threat of an attack on Americans in the United States to a whole new level,” he added. The biggest concern for the agency is attacks by violent extremists or lone actors in the US, inspired by hate speech and calls for violence.

The number of anti-Semitic acts in the United States had already been increasing before the war between Israel and Hamas, partly led by white supremacist propaganda and new nationalist groups across the country. But since Hamas’s attack on October 7, the drumbeat of anti-Semitic threats and acts has increased dramatically.

“I will say this is a threat that is somehow reaching historic levels,” Mr Wray said.

“The Jewish community is being targeted by terrorists from across the spectrum – homegrown violent extremists; foreign terrorist organizations, both Sunni and Shia; domestic violent extremists,” he added.

Mr. Wray cited several foreign terrorist groups that have issued calls to attack Americans, and Jews in particular, in the wake of Hamas’s attacks. On October 7, Hamas gunmen killed more than 1,400 people, including women and children, and kidnapped more than 200 people.

The Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has called for attacks on Jewish communities in the United States and Europe, and Al Qaeda has made a specific call to attack the United States, Mr. Wray said.

Al Qaeda’s call urged “Islamic movements” to form sleeper cells and support “operations against Jews and their interests,” according to a person who saw parts of the message and spoke on condition of anonymity to share sensitive information. Mr. Wray said al Qaeda’s message was the most specific call to attack the United States that intelligence officials had seen in five years.

“With so many foreign terrorist organizations so explicitly calling for attacks,” Mr. Wray said, this significantly increases the potential terrorist threat to the United States.

The war also caused political division in the United States. Posters of victims abducted by Hamas on October 7 are being torn down on some college campuses in the United States to protest Israel’s response to the attack and its prolonged treatment of Palestinians. Private companies, universities and even the Writers Guild of America have been criticized for statements officials have and have not made about the new wave of violence in the Middle East.

Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, said that since October 7, federal officials have responded to an increase in threats against “Jewish, Muslim and Arab-American communities and institutions across our country.”

Jews represent less than 3 percent of the U.S. population but were the target of about 60 percent of faith-based hate crimes even before Oct. 7, Mr. Wray said, citing 2022 statistics.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, there were 312 anti-Semitic acts in the United States between October 7 and 23, of which 190 were directly related to the war. This includes an incident on October 15 at New York’s Grand Central Terminal that reportedly involved someone punched a Jewish woman in the face because she was Jewish.

Mr. Wray pointed to a recent arrest in Houston on Oct. 19 of a Palestinian asylum seeker who had been in the United States since June 2019 on a travel visa that expired a few months later. Mr Wray said the man, whom prosecutors identified as Sohaib Abuayyash, 20, had studied how to make bombs and posted details online about his support for killing Jewish people.

Prosecutors said he was illegally in possession of a firearm and had been in contact with “others who share radical thinking, physical training and weapons training in order to potentially commit an attack,” according to the indictment. edited.

Biden administration officials have been in regular contact with members of Jewish communities across the country, Mr. Wray said, adding that the agency had previously established an intelligence fusion cell with agents working on hate crimes and domestic terrorism “to ensure that we’ We see the full landscape and are doing our best to be proactive in this area.”

In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul on Tuesday announced up to $75 million in grants to local police departments and houses of worship in response to a raise in reported anti-Semitic attacks and hate crimes against Palestinians in the aftermath of the war between Israel and Hamas.

Hate-fueled attacks against Muslims and Arabs in the United States have also been on the rise since October 7. Council on American Islamic Relationsa civil rights organization, said it received more than 700 complaints between Oct. 7 and Oct. 25, including reported incidents and threats to shoot and kill American Muslims. The organization said the number of incidents and threats has not been that high. since December 2015, after Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate, said he would ban Muslims from traveling to the United States.

The most prominent of these recent attacks is the murder of a six-year-old Palestinian American in Illinois. The landlord of the home where the boy and his mother lived was arrested for stabbing them both in what is being treated as a hate crime.

In New York, police recently arrested two men accused them of hate crimes for allegedly being part of a group that shouted anti-Muslim insults during an attack on three men on October 11. According to a 2022 FBI report, nearly 8 percent of faith-based hate crimes were against Muslims, which is similar to 2021 levels.

Glenn Thrush reporting contributed.