Senior Israeli intelligence officials say warnings delivered to Australia ahead of a deadly attack at a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach were part of a much broader alert: an accelerating global rise in attempts to execute terror attacks across Western countries, increasingly aimed not only at Jewish targets, but also at Christians and large gatherings especially during religious holidays.
According to a senior Israeli intelligence official, Israel’s foreign intelligence service has been tracking a sharp increase in attempted attacks worldwide, many of them low-tech, quickly mobilized and designed to exploit open societies and crowded public events.
‘We stopped a few ticking bombs, the target was on people’s heads,’ the senior official told Fox News Digital.
Israeli intelligence officials say Australia is not an outlier. From their perspective, recent months have revealed a pattern of attempted and disrupted plots across Europe, North America and beyond, pointing to a sustained global threat rather than sporadic violence.
‘If you knew how many terror attacks we exposed and prevented,’ the senior official said, ‘your jaw would drop.’
Israeli intelligence officials say the rise in attempted attacks is driven in part by how extremist and state-linked networks build terror infrastructure globally while deliberately masking their origins.
Officials say the networks frequently rely on non-Iranian nationals to carry out different roles along the operational chain, including logistics, intelligence gathering, financing and execution, in order to blur any connection to Tehran. In some cases, operatives are recruited from migrant or refugee backgrounds, while in others criminal elements or hired proxies are used to carry out acts of violence.
To avoid detection, officials say the networks rely on encrypted communications and clandestine in-person meetings, sometimes conducted outside the country where an attack is planned. In other cases, instructions are delivered remotely through secure channels that bypass standard telecommunications monitoring.
According to Israeli assessments, extremist networks are increasingly overlapping: jihadist ideology, lone-actor violence and state-linked activity now exist in the same ecosystem, fueled by online radicalization and geopolitical instability. Many plots, officials say, are unsophisticated, making them harder to detect early while still capable of causing mass casualties.
Israeli intelligence officials and foreign diplomatic sources warn that the threat is not limited to Jewish targets and is global. ‘We exposed terror cells in Germany, Greece, Austria — but not only Europe — also in South America, India and Thailand.’ The senior official said he cannot elaborate further.
A senior foreign diplomatic source said the current environment is being shaped by what they described as a global contagion effect, in which attacks are amplified online, celebrated across extremist networks and rapidly imitated elsewhere.
According to the source, attacks are increasingly attractive to extremists because they are relatively easy to carry out while producing outsized psychological and political impact.
The source cautioned that Christian communities and broader civilian gatherings are also vulnerable, particularly during religious holidays and symbolic events that attract large crowds.
This concern has been reflected across Europe in recent weeks, when authorities sharply increased security at Christmas markets and holiday celebrations amid warnings that seasonal events present prime targets for extremist violence. Armed patrols, barriers and surveillance were expanded in multiple cities as officials assessed elevated risks tied to jihadist-inspired attacks and lone actors.
On Monday, federal authorities announced they foiled a New Year’s Eve terror plot, arresting suspects accused of planning coordinated attacks involving improvised explosive devices, according to the Department of Justice. Prosecutors said the plot was disrupted before explosives were fully assembled, underscoring both the scale of the threat and the importance of early intelligence intervention.
A second senior Israeli intelligence source said the broader threat environment has deteriorated after two years of war in the Middle East, which they said has energized radical Islamist movements globally.
According to the source, instability in Syria is of particular concern, creating conditions that could allow ISIS to regroup and once again project influence beyond the region.
‘I’m worried about Syria and that ISIS will return,’ the source said, warning that renewed activity there could inspire further attacks in Europe, Australia and North America.
The source said the growing prevalence of lone actors and sleeper cells poses a significant challenge to Western security services, as individuals with minimal resources can still carry out deadly attacks and trigger copycat violence.
While Australian authorities have not linked the Bondi Beach attack to foreign intelligence direction, Israeli officials say the case fits into a wider global picture: a sustained rise in attempted terror attacks, many of which never become public because they are disrupted early.
‘We see it everywhere,’ the senior intelligence official said. ‘And most of what we stop, the public never hears about.’