Israel’s National Security Council warned this week that Iran and its proxies remain the leading global terror threat to Jews and Israelis, singling out the approaching anniversary of the October 7 massacre as a period of heightened danger. The warning, issued Sunday, arrived alongside a rare admission from a senior NSC official: Israeli security agencies have quietly thwarted dozens of terror plots against Jewish targets abroad over the past year.
The timing is significant. The High Holy Days, the most sacred stretch of the Jewish calendar, have repeatedly become the moment terrorists choose to strike.
A pattern with a body count
The NSC assessment, first reported by The Jerusalem Post, said Hamas is investing significant resources in building terror infrastructure across Europe with the explicit goal of carrying out revenge attacks on Israelis and Jews. The Houthis have called for attacks on Israelis traveling through Somaliland and elsewhere in Africa. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force and intelligence services continue to fund and direct networks built for a single purpose: killing Jews wherever they can be found.
A senior NSC official told the Post that Israeli strikes inside Iran during the recent war had disrupted senior figures in Tehran’s terror apparatus, giving Israel an operational freedom “particularly in Tehran” that did not exist before. “There are many people who wake up in the morning and their entire mission is to promote attacks against Israelis and Jews around the world,” the official said. He added that Hezbollah, though badly weakened, remains an active threat: “There is no status quo with Hezbollah.”
Countries near Iran, including Azerbaijan, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, were flagged for elevated risk due to established Iranian networks. Jordan, Qatar, Somaliland, and Egypt remain under Level 4 travel warnings. Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon remain off-limits entirely to Israeli citizens by law. Jews traveling abroad were advised to avoid displaying kippot or clothing with Hebrew lettering, and to limit speaking Hebrew in public in higher-risk countries.
Islamists Attack on Jewish Holidays
Fifty-two years before Hamas terrorists poured across the Gaza border into southern Israel on Simchat Torah (the holiday marking the completion of the annual Torah reading cycle), Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise assault on Israel on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), the holiest day of the Jewish year, in 1973. The choice of date was deliberate both times: a day when Jews are gathered, at rest, and least prepared to defend themselves.
The pattern has repeated far beyond Israel’s borders. On October 2, 2025, a terrorist rammed his car into worshippers outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester, England, on Yom Kippur itself, then began stabbing people before police shot him dead. Adrian Daulby and Melvin Cravitz, both members of the congregation, were killed. The attack came six years after security guards thwarted a gunman who tried to shoot his way into a synagogue in Halle, Germany, also on Yom Kippur, in 2019.
On April 27, 2019, a gunman opened fire inside the Chabad of Poway synagogue near San Diego on the final day of Passover, killing Lori Gilbert-Kaye and wounding the rabbi and two others. The attack came exactly six months after a gunman murdered eleven worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Most recently, on December 14, 2025, two gunmen opened fire on a Hanukkah (the Festival of Lights) celebration hosted by Chabad of Bondi at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, killing fifteen people, including a ten-year-old girl and a Holocaust survivor, and wounding dozens more. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called it a targeted act of antisemitic terrorism carried out “on the first day of Hanukkah, which should be a day of joy.” Investigators later found ISIS flags in the attackers’ possession. The massacre followed two years in which the Executive Council of Australian Jewry recorded more than 3,700 antisemitic incidents nationwide, including the arson of a Melbourne synagogue.
The numbers behind the warning
The NSC’s comes as the result of a documented, years-long surge in antisemitic hostility that has moved well beyond graffiti and slurs into gunfire and car rammings. A report from the J7, a coalition of Jewish communal organizations across seven countries, found more than 23,000 antisemitic incidents recorded in 2025 alone, a 136 percent jump in total incidents and a 97 percent jump in violent incidents compared with 2022. The report describes antisemitic violence at its highest level in three decades.
The country-by-country breakdown reads like a map of the last two years of Jewish anxiety. Australia recorded a 270 percent rise in antisemitic incidents since 2021, a trajectory that culminated in the Bondi Beach massacre. Germany recorded a 215 percent increase over the same period, with 8,725 incidents in 2025 and the highest per-capita rate among J7 countries. Canada saw a 60 percent rise. The report concluded that antisemitism is “no longer confined to the fringes” and that Jews across multiple countries now report hiding their identity in public and questioning whether they have a future in the countries where they live.
In the United States, the Anti-Defamation League’s annual audit recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024, the highest total since the organization began tracking incidents in 1979 and the fourth consecutive record-breaking year. That figure includes 196 assaults, a 21 percent rise over 2023, and 2,606 cases of vandalism, over a third of them involving swastikas. For the first time, a majority of all incidents, 58 percent, involved direct references to Israel or Zionism. Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s CEO, called the level of hatred a “persistent and grim reality” rather than a passing spike tied to the aftermath of October 7.
No coincidence
Every one of these attacks, separated by continents and decades, shares a single feature: the perpetrators waited for Jews to gather in celebration or prayer, then struck. Egypt and Syria understood it in 1973. Hamas understood it on October 7, 2023. The killers in Poway, Halle, Manchester, and Bondi Beach understood it too.
Israel’s NSC is not issuing this warning out of caution alone. It is responding to a documented, decades-long pattern in which the Jewish calendar itself has become a target list. The dozens of plots Israeli intelligence has quietly stopped this year are the ones that did not make headlines. Manchester and Bondi Beach are what happens when one gets through.
