The killing of Yahya Sinwar and wider unrest in the Middle East may lead to a resurgence in Islamist terrorism, a former MI6 chief has said.
Sir John Sawers, the former head of the UK’s foreign intelligence service, was speaking to Sky News days after the Hamas leader was killed.
Mounting anger over the Palestinian issue and the proliferation of violent, distressing footage captured in Gaza could see Islamist movements turn their attention beyond the Middle East, he told the channel.
“(Islamist) 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,” Sawers said.
Israel is waging military campaigns against Hamas in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The two organizations have decades-old overseas funding and finance networks but could soon “revert back to international terrorism,” Sawer said.
“And it could be that Hezbollah and Hamas, the new leaderships there are focused so much on violence that they’ve become not just terrorist organizations designated by Western countries and aimed against Israel, but they could revert back to international terrorism, including here in the UK.”
Intelligence agencies in Europe and North America should “be very much on their toes,” Sawer added.
“So, I think MI5, the police, the other intelligence agencies like my former one, MI6, they need to be very much on their toes, to watch out for a further rise in Islamic terrorism.”
Mustafa Barghouti, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, appeared on the Sky News show, describing Sinwar as a “person who fought for his country and who fought for his people, and not as a terrorist.”
The Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack, which Sinwar had organized, was a response to decades of ethnic cleansing conducted by Israel against Palestinians, he said.
Barghouti told Sky that he had long advocated for nonviolent approaches to the Palestinian cause.
“In my opinion, the killing of Sinwar will not really help or improve the situation because Sinwar was not the obstacle to achieving a ceasefire,” he said.
He condemned Western media sources for measuring Palestinian lives as less valuable than Israelis, highlighting Israel’s killing of about 17,000 children in Gaza during the war.
“The problem with most of Western media is that you present a situation as if the killing of an innocent Israeli civilian is a terrorist act,” Barghouti said.
“While the killing of … you never say it, that the killing of 17,000 children, Palestinian children, is an act of terrorism and that the terrorist in this case is Netanyahu and his Israeli government.”
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