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Iran’s Assassination Plots Against Jews Persist Despite the West’s Leniency on Regime
Workers work to convert the Eiffel Tower Stadium from the beach volleyball venue to the Paralympic blind football venue for the coming Paris 2024 Paralympic Games on Aug. 18, 2024. Photo: Reuters
The French police recently charged a French-Algerian dual citizen and his partner for allegedly conspiring to assassinate Israelis and Jews in Paris, Munich, and Berlin — all at the behest of Iran.
Iran’s efforts to murder Jews overseas demonstrates how the regime in Tehran has intensified its support for terrorism and assassination plots in the West, despite outreach and economic concessions by the United States and Europe.
The French General Directorate for Internal Security claimed on September 8 that Iran had planned to assassinate some seven individuals across Europe as part of a plot to “strike targeted civilians” to “create insecurity for the opposition” to Tehran’s regime “from within the Jewish/Israeli community.”
The plot aimed to intimidate the Islamic Republic’s opponents, in order to dissuade them from engaging in activism against the clerical dictatorship.
The Islamic Republic has long cultivated and exploited connections to criminal networks, which are behind a recent wave of violent plots targeting Jewish communities and Iranian dissidents across Europe and the United States.
The networks include the Hells Angels biker gang in Germany, the Eastern European criminal organization known as the Organization, and the Swedish Foxtrot and Rumba organized crime networks.
Troublingly, while the regime’s assassinations — often implemented covertly by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Ministry of Intelligence (MOI) — date to the Islamic Republic’s founding in 1979, recent years have seen a marked escalation of the theocracy’s efforts.
The Israeli Mossad recently reported that Iran has facilitated a string of terror attacks on Israeli embassies across Europe by capitalizing on the global antisemitic wave after the Hamas terror attacks of October 7. The Mossad stated that Tehran was behind a grenade attack against Israel’s embassy in Belgium in May 2024. Similarly, Swedish intelligence confirmed in May 2024 that Iran had orchestrated the foiled bombing attack against the Israeli embassy in Stockholm earlier this year.
Despite the Islamic Republic’s claims of differentiating between Jews and Zionists, the regime’s foreign plots have consistently targeted Jewish communities independent from Israel.
For instance, Germany concluded that Tehran had plotted the attempted arson attack on a synagogue in Dusseldorf in 2022.
Iranian dissidents, anti-regime activists, and journalists have also fallen victim to Tehran’s transnational attacks. Most notably, in 2018, a Belgium court convicted the Vienna-based Iranian diplomat Assadollah Assadi for a plot to bomb the annual convention of the National Council of Resistance of Iran. Belgian authorities said that Assadi was an Iranian intelligence officer operating under diplomatic cover, carrying out orders from the MOI.
Tehran’s reach has even extended to the United States, evidenced by foiled plots to assassinate and kidnap the New York-based Masih Alinejad — an Iranian-American dissident and journalist who was the target of a thwarted kidnapping attempt by Iranian intelligence services in 2021.
In 2023, the US Department of Justice charged three men with ties to Iran and to an Eastern European criminal network who were plotting to assassinate Alinejad in her New York home in 2022.
Iran also facilitated the failed 2022 assassination attempt in New York against Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, a novel that had prompted Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to issue a fatwa in 1989 calling for his death. The US District Court in Buffalo claimed that the perpetrator, who stabbed Rushdie multiple times, provided “material support and resources” to the Tehran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah between September 2020 and the day of the attack.
The European Union should respond to these attacks by designating the IRGC as a terrorist entity, like the United States did in 2019.
Furthermore, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France should reinstate UN sanctions on Iran by triggering the snapback process in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which endorsed the 2015 nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
In a letter dated April 10, 2023, some 130 members of the US House of Representatives urged the EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, to designate the IRGC as a terrorist entity. A month earlier, 12 members of the US Senate sent a letter with the same message to Borrell. At long last, he needs to listen to them.
Until then, the United States must maintain this pressure to ensure that Washington and Europe pose a unified stance against Tehran’s malign ambitions. At the same time, Washington should reimpose maximum economic pressure on Iran in order to send the regime a message that it will pay a significant price for its violence. After decades of assassinations, whether completed or attempted, there is no more time to waste.
Janatan Sayeh is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies focused on Iranian domestic affairs and the Islamic Republic’s regional malign influence. Follow him on X @JanatanSayeh.
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Israel Says Missile Launched by Yemen’s Houthis ‘Most Likely’ Intercepted
Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi addresses followers via a video link at the al-Shaab Mosque, formerly al-Saleh Mosque, in Sanaa, Yemen, Feb. 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
The Israeli army said on Saturday that a missile fired from Yemen towards Israeli territory had been “most likely successfully intercepted,” while Yemen’s Houthi forces claimed responsibility for the launch.
Israel has threatened Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi movement – which has been attacking Israel in what it says is solidarity with Gaza – with a naval and air blockade if its attacks on Israel persist.
The Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree said the group was responsible for Saturday’s attack, adding that it fired a missile towards the southern Israeli city of Beersheba.
Since the start of Israel’s war in Gaza in October 2023, the Houthis, who control most of Yemen, have been firing at Israel and at shipping in the Red Sea, disrupting global trade.
Most of the dozens of missiles and drones they have launched have been intercepted or fallen short. Israel has carried out a series of retaliatory strikes.
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Iran Holds Funeral for Commanders and Scientists Killed in War with Israel
People attend the funeral procession of Iranian military commanders, nuclear scientists and others killed in Israeli strikes, in Tehran, Iran, June 28, 2025. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Large crowds of mourners dressed in black lined streets in Iran’s capital Tehran as the country held a funeral on Saturday for top military commanders, nuclear scientists and some of the civilians killed during this month’s aerial war with Israel.
At least 16 scientists and 10 senior commanders were among those mourned at the funeral, according to state media, including armed forces chief Major General Mohammad Bagheri, Revolutionary Guards commander General Hossein Salami, and Guards Aerospace Force chief General Amir Ali Hajizadeh.
Their coffins were driven into Tehran’s Azadi Square adorned with their photos and national flags, as crowds waved flags and some reached out to touch the caskets and throw rose petals onto them. State-run Press TV showed an image of ballistic missiles on display.
Mass prayers were later held in the square.
State TV said the funeral, dubbed the “procession of the Martyrs of Power,” was held for a total of 60 people killed in the war, including four women and four children.
In attendance were President Masoud Pezeshkian and other senior figures including Ali Shamkhani, who was seriously wounded during the conflict and is an adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as Khamenei’s son Mojtaba.
“Today, Iranians, through heroic resistance against two regimes armed with nuclear weapons, protected their honor and dignity, and look to the future prouder, more dignified, and more resolute than ever,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, who also attended the funeral, said in a Telegram post.
There was no immediate statement from Khamenei, who has not appeared publicly since the conflict began. In past funerals, he led prayers over the coffins of senior commanders ahead of public ceremonies broadcast on state television.
Israel launched the air war on June 13, attacking Iranian nuclear facilities and killing top military commanders as well as civilians in the worst blow to the Islamic Republic since the 1980s war with Iraq.
Iran retaliated with barrages of missiles on Israeli military sites, infrastructure and cities. The United States entered the war on June 22 with strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
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Israel, the only Middle Eastern country widely believed to have nuclear weapons, said it aimed to prevent Tehran from developing its own nuclear weapons.
Iran denies having a nuclear weapons program. The U.N. nuclear watchdog has said it has “no credible indication” of an active, coordinated weapons program in Iran.
Bagheri, Salami and Hajizadeh were killed on June 13, the first day of the war. Bagheri was being buried at the Behesht Zahra cemetery outside Tehran mid-afternoon on Saturday. Salami and Hajizadeh were due to be buried on Sunday.
US President Donald Trump said on Friday that he would consider bombing Iran again, while Khamenei, who has appeared in two pre-recorded video messages since the start of the war, has said Iran would respond to any future US attack by striking US military bases in the Middle East.
A senior Israeli military official said on Friday that Israel had delivered a “major blow” to Iran’s nuclear project. On Saturday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said in a statement that Israel and the US “failed to achieve their stated objectives” in the war.
According to Iranian health ministry figures, 610 people were killed on the Iranian side in the war before a ceasefire went into effect on Tuesday. More than 4,700 were injured.
Activist news agency HRANA put the number of killed at 974, including 387 civilians.
Israel’s health ministry said 28 were killed in Israel and 3,238 injured.
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Pro-Palestinian Rapper Leads ‘Death to the IDF’ Chant at English Music festival
Revellers dance as Avril Lavigne performs on the Other Stage during the Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm, in Pilton, Somerset, Britain, June 30, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Dylan Martinez
i24 News – Chants of “death to the IDF” were heard during the English Glastonbury music festival on Saturday ahead of the appearance of the pro-Palestinian Irish rappers Kneecap.
One half of punk duo based Bob Vylan (who both use aliases to protect their privacy) shouted out during a section of their show “Death to the IDF” – the Israeli military. Videos posted on X (formerly Twitter) show the crowd responding to and repeating the cheer.
This comes after officials had petitioned the music festival to drop the band. The rap duo also expressed support for the following act, Kneecap, who the BCC refused to show live after one of its members, Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh – better known by stage name Mo Chara – was charged with a terror offense.
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