Seven people have been arrested in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands on suspicion of planning terror attacks on Jewish institutions in Europe.
On Thursday, German officials said they had arrested four suspected Hamas members who were planning a terror attack against Jewish institutions in Berlin.
On the same day, Danish officials announced arrests related to separate terror offences.
German prosecutors said that three suspects detained in Berlin and another in the Netherlands were members of Hamas.
Bild, the German tabloid, reported that “The three men have close ties to senior leaders of Hamas’s military wing.”
According to German prosecutors, Hamas leaders in Lebanon had tasked the operatives with moving a cache of weapons from a depot in an undisclosed European location to Berlin in order to carry out an attack.
Prosecutors said the weapons were due to be “kept in a state of readiness in view of potential terrorist attacks against Jewish institutions in Europe".
It is not known if the arrests in Denmark were also connected to Hamas but the three arrests will be charged under terror laws, police said.
The Danish Prime Minister described the plot as being “as serious as it gets” and authorities in Denmark said they would up security at Jewish sites.
A joint statement from Mossad and the Shin Bet security service released by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that the arrests “thwarted a terror attack plot that aimed to kill innocent civilians in Europe”.
The arrests come as concern mounts globally over possible terror attacks from Hamas outside Israel.
The Israeli intelligence statement said: “In recent years, and more since the murderous onslaught on October 7, Hamas has been striving to expand its operational capabilities around the world and especially in Europe to realize its ambitions of targeting Israelis, Jews and Westerners at any cost.”
The Community Security Trust said: “On the face of it, the revelation that Hamas operatives may have been planning to attack Jewish communities in Europe is a serious development and marks a significant escalation in the threat posed by Hamas, not just to European Jews but to wider society.
"In the current climate of record levels of antisemitic hate crime and rampant anti-Jewish incitement online, such a move would underline the ongoing threat faced by Jewish communities right now.”
