A return of Islamic extremist terror attacks on British soil could be triggered by the killings of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, the former head of MI6 has said.
Sir John Sawers said police and intelligence agencies in Britain should be “on their toes” after changes of leadership at terrorist organisations in the Middle East.
On Thursday Israeli troops confirmed the assassination of the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, who masterminded the Palestinian militant group’s 7 October attacks last year.
In an interview with Sky News’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips, Sawers said: “Islamic terrorism may actually get a further boost, if that’s the right word, from events in the Middle East. The frustrations that we’ll be seeing because of the lack of movement on the Palestinian question, because of the violence people are witnessing every day.
“And it could be that Hezbollah and Hamas, the new leaderships there, are focused so much on violence that they become not just terrorist organisations designated by western countries and aimed against Israel, but they could revert back to international terrorism, including here in the UK.”
Sawers was chief of the Secret Intelligence Service from 2009 to 2014 and also worked in the Middle East as an ambassador to Egypt.
Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister, urged a ceasefire in the Middle East in a telephone call on Saturday with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, after a drone hit Netanyahu’s home on the Israeli coast.
A Downing Street spokesperson told reporters that Starmer expressed alarm at the apparent assassination attempt on Netanyahu. According to the spokesperson, the leaders also discussed the killing of the Hamas leader, Sinwar, who Starmer said was a “brutal terrorist” who left the world “a better place without him”.
On Friday, Starmer spoke in Berlin to urge the international community to make the most of the “opportunity” presented by Sinwar’s death to secure a ceasefire.
Starmer also warned that the world would not tolerate “any more excuses” for not allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza. At least 42,603 Palestinian people have been killed and 99,795 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, according to a Gaza health ministry statement on Sunday.
After Sinwar’s death, Joe Biden, the US president, urged Israel’s prime minister on Friday to “move on” and push ahead with a ceasefire in Gaza. But there is little sign of a willingness from Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran to bring an end to fighting.
Netanyahu blamed the attack on his home on Hezbollah and said it had been a “grave mistake” that would “not deter me or the state of Israel from continuing our just war against our enemies in order to secure our future”.
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Iran, which backs both Hamas and Hezbollah, has vowed that Hamas will fight on.
The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah continues to carry out rocket attacks into Israel. There were reports on Sunday of “intense bombing” and gunfire at Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza.
Last week, the US warned Israel that it faced losing the transfer of American weapons if it did not take immediate action to let more humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the occupied Palestinian territory said on Sunday that not enough aid was being allowed in and that it could not “run a humanitarian operation at the scale needed with just a few unreliable and poorly accessible crossing points”.