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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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Iranian Media Claims Obtaining ‘Sensitive’ Israeli Intelligence Materials
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
i24 News – Iranian and Iran-affiliated media claimed on Saturday that the Islamic Republic had obtained a trove of “strategic and sensitive” Israeli intelligence materials related to Israel’s nuclear facilities and defense plans.
“Iran’s intelligence apparatus has obtained a vast quantity of strategic and sensitive information and documents belonging to the Zionist regime,” Iran’s state broadcaster said, referring to Israel in the manner accepted in those Muslim or Arab states that don’t recognize its legitimacy. The statement was also relayed by the Lebanese site Al-Mayadeen, affiliated with the Iran-backed jihadists of Hezbollah.
The reports did not include any details on the documents or how Iran had obtained them.
The intelligence reportedly included “thousands of documents related to that regime’s nuclear plans and facilities,” it added.
According to the reports, “the data haul was extracted during a covert operation and included a vast volume of materials including documents, images, and videos.”
The report comes amid high tensions over Iran’s nuclear program, over which it is in talks with the US administration of President Donald Trump.
Iranian-Israeli tensions reached an all-time high since the October 7 massacre and the subsequent Gaza war, including Iranian rocket fire on Israel and Israeli aerial raids in Iran that devastated much of the regime’s air defenses.
Israel, which regards the prospect of the antisemitic mullah regime obtaining a nuclear weapon as an existential threat, has indicated it could resort to a military strike against Iran’s installations should talks fail to curb uranium enrichment.
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Israel Retrieves Body of Thai Hostage from Gaza
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz looks on, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, in Jerusalem, Nov. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
The Israeli military has retrieved the body of a Thai hostage who had been held in Gaza since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack, Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Saturday.
Nattapong Pinta’s body was held by a Palestinian terrorist group called the Mujahedeen Brigades, and was recovered from the area of Rafah in southern Gaza, Katz said. His family in Thailand has been notified.
Pinta, an agricultural worker, was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, a small Israeli community near the Gaza border where a quarter of the population was killed or taken hostage during the Hamas attack that triggered the devastating war in Gaza.
Israel’s military said Pinta had been abducted alive and killed by his captors, who had also killed and taken to Gaza the bodies of two more Israeli-American hostages that were retrieved earlier this week.
There was no immediate comment from the Mujahedeen Brigades, who have previously denied killing their captives, or from Hamas. The Israeli military said the Brigades were still holding the body of another foreign national. Only 20 of the 55 remaining hostages are believed to still be alive.
The Mujahedeen Brigades also held and killed Israeli hostage Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, according to Israeli authorities. Their bodies were returned during a two-month ceasefire, which collapsed in March after the two sides could not agree on terms for extending it to a second phase.
Israel has since expanded its offensive across the Gaza Strip as US, Qatari and Egyptian-led efforts to secure another ceasefire have faltered.
US-BACKED AID GROUP HALTS DISTRIBUTIONS
The United Nations has warned that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli blockade of the enclave, with the rate of young children suffering from acute malnutrition nearly tripling.
Aid distribution was halted on Friday after the US-and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said overcrowding had made it unsafe to continue operations. It was unclear whether aid had resumed on Saturday.
The GHF began distributing food packages in Gaza at the end of May, overseeing a new model of aid distribution which the United Nations says is neither impartial nor neutral. It says it has provided around 9 million meals so far.
The Israeli military said on Saturday that 350 trucks of humanitarian aid belonging to U.N. and other international relief groups were transferred this week via the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza.
The war erupted after Hamas-led terrorists took 251 hostages and killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, in the October 7, 2023 attack, Israel’s single deadliest day.
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US Mulls Giving Millions to Controversial Gaza Aid Foundation, Sources Say
Palestinians carry aid supplies which they received from the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in the central Gaza Strip, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed/File Photo
The State Department is weighing giving $500 million to the new foundation providing aid to war-shattered Gaza, according to two knowledgeable sources and two former US officials, a move that would involve the US more deeply in a controversial aid effort that has been beset by violence and chaos.
The sources and former US officials, all of whom requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that money for Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) would come from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which is being folded into the US State Department.
The plan has met resistance from some US officials concerned with the deadly shootings of Palestinians near aid distribution sites and the competence of the GHF, the two sources said.
The GHF, which has been fiercely criticized by humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations, for an alleged lack of neutrality, began distributing aid last week amid warnings that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli aid blockade, which was lifted on May 19 when limited deliveries were allowed to resume.
The foundation has seen senior personnel quit and had to pause handouts twice this week after crowds overwhelmed its distribution hubs.
The State Department and GHF did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Reuters has been unable to establish who is currently funding the GHF operations, which began in Gaza last week. The GHF uses private US security and logistics companies to transport aid into Gaza for distribution at so-called secure distribution sites.
On Thursday, Reuters reported that a Chicago-based private equity firm, McNally Capital, has an “economic interest” in the for-profit US contractor overseeing the logistics and security of GHF’s aid distribution hubs in the enclave.
While US President Donald Trump’s administration and Israel say they don’t finance the GHF operation, both have been pressing the United Nations and international aid groups to work with it.
The US and Israel argue that aid distributed by a long-established U.N. aid network was diverted to Hamas. Hamas has denied that.
USAID has been all but dismantled. Some 80 percent of its programs have been canceled and its staff face termination as part of President Donald Trump’s drive to align US foreign policy with his “America First” agenda.
One source with knowledge of the matter and one former senior official said the proposal to give the $500 million to GHF has been championed by acting deputy USAID Administrator Ken Jackson, who has helped oversee the agency’s dismemberment.
The source said that Israel requested the funds to underwrite GHF’s operations for 180 days.
The Israeli government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The two sources said that some US officials have concerns with the plan because of the overcrowding that has affected the aid distribution hubs run by GHF’s contractor, and violence nearby.
Those officials also want well-established non-governmental organizations experienced in running aid operations in Gaza and elsewhere to be involved in the operation if the State Department approves the funds for GHF, a position that Israel likely will oppose, the sources said.
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