What does the Israel-Hamas war mean for security in the UK?

Rishi Sunak has told security forces to prepare for a terrorist attack in the UK, amid fears that the intensifying Israel-Hamas war could provoke further hate crimes or be exploited by rogue states.

Ministers held an emergency Cobra committee meeting on Monday with national security officials and police, the first such meeting since the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October. The prime minister asked officials to "prepare for and mitigate against the risk of incidents", in the wake of spiralling violence and an escalation in Israeli retaliation. Sources said Sunak asked police and MI5 to conduct "tabletop exercises to simulate our response to potential public order and counter terror scenarios", the Daily Mail reported.

Nearly 100 arrests have been made in London since the conflict began, amid mass pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the capital every weekend calling for a ceasefire. Met Commissioner Mark Rowley predicted that there would be "many, many more arrests" over the next week, as police tracked down people who allegedly breached public order and terrorism laws. Home Secretary Suella Braverman described such demonstrations, in which more than 100,000 people took part, as "hate marches".

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What did the papers say?

Britain's most senior police officer said that the events in the Middle East were causing a surge in hate crimes in the UK. "For Jewish communities, it's now about a 14-fold increase in antisemitism in London," Rowley told Sky News's "Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips" programme, "and for Muslim communities, it's nearly threefold. So this is really precarious." 

Rowley also cited a surge in hate crime and terrorism being "accelerated" by state-level threats from Iran.

The FBI has said that "ongoing violence in Gaza looks set to spawn the most significant domestic terrorism threat in years", wrote Charles Lister, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, for The Daily Telegraph. "That will be even more true in Europe."

The issue of Palestine "used to be a potent rallying cry for jihadists the world over", he said, although in recent years that "fell away". However, "current events risk placing it right back at the forefront again, and this time around, it won't be so locally contained". 

Earlier this month, the director general of MI5, Ken McCallum, said his officers were "focused with particular intensity" on a growing risk of attacks within the UK. "Sadly, over the course of my career, it has often been the case that events in the Middle East can then echo in Europe", he told Sky News in a rare interview.

The intelligence service is "absolutely alert to the possibility" that events could cause some in the UK to "attempt some form of attack of whatever sort", McCallum said, ahead of a gathering of heads of intelligence agencies from the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand in California. 

There is "sharpened concern" of threats from far-right antisemitism, Islamophobia, Islamist extremism and aggression from foreign states, McCallum said. "The world is a very uncertain place right now."

Earlier this month Robin Simcox, the Home Office's commissioner for countering extremism, said that "the scale of Iranian-backed activity" in the UK was "underappreciated", as well as "the extent to which Iran attempts to stoke extremism here". 

What next?

British counter-terrorism officers are "monitoring closely if Iran will try to exploit the Israel-Hamas war for its own ends in the UK", said The Guardian's defence and security editor Dan Sabbagh, "amid wider anxieties that Tehran is an increasing security menace to dissidents and critics".

Concerns about Russia and China are "well established", but Iran's "campaign of intimidation and harassment has been the most visible development in the domestic threat picture" over the past year.

The fear is "whether Iran will seek to encourage radical groups or even terrorist activities in the UK", Sabbagh said, "although it is not clear there is any evidence of this to date".

However, while such a development would be a "significant step up" in terms of Iranian activity, such is the "intensity of the crisis" that "nothing is being ruled out by insiders".