LONDON — British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Wednesday that the country was facing a “deeply concerning” wave of violence against Jewish residents after a stabbing in north London, which followed more than a dozen attacks that are being investigated over possible links to Iran.
Starmer’s comments in the House of Commons came as U.K. Metropolitan Police arrested a 45-year-old man suspected of stabbing two people Wednesday in Golders Green, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood where ambulances were set ablaze last month in an arson attack.
The suspect, who was not immediately identified, was taken into custody after being Tasered, the Metropolitan Police said in a statement. Two men were treated at the scene for stab wounds.
A graphic video reposted by many on social media, including Israel’s Foreign Ministry, showed a man wearing a dark coat and backpack lunging for the throat of a pedestrian standing near a bus stop. The assailant and victim struggle before falling out of view, in footage apparently captured by a security camera.
The stabbing, which took place near midday on bustling suburban street, added to an outbreak of suspected antisemitic violence that has rattled European authorities and, in recent days, triggered diplomatic confrontations.
Iran’s ambassador was summoned to the U.K. Foreign Ministry on Tuesday over alleged incendiary social media posts, including a call for Iranian nationals abroad to be “ready to sacrifice our lives” to defend the Islamic Republic. Iran denied that it was seeking to incite violence.
Following the attack, the Israeli government lashed out at Starmer. “The UK government can no longer claim this is under control,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “Starmer’s statements are no substitute for confronting the roots of antisemitism festering across [the] United Kingdom.”
More broadly, the flurry of attacks has raised fears that Iran is ramping up its use of sleeper cells and proxies recruited online — including minors offered cash for acts of sabotage — to wage a campaign of retaliation against countries seen as supporting the U.S.-Israeli war launched in late February.
Many of the attacks have been claimed by a shadowy entity that surfaced online last month and calls itself the Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right. British authorities and their counterparts in Europe are investigating the organization, whose online imagery and postings suggest possible ties to Iran’s security services or proxy militias.
Starmer’s government has taken pains to distance itself from the Iran war, at first refusing to allow U.S. military aircraft to use British air bases for bombing runs, a stance that was subsequently softened to allow “defensive” strikes aimed at blunting Iran’s ability to attack British bases in the region or its Middle East allies.
Even so, Britain has confronted a surge in violence since the war’s start that is unmatched in the United States or elsewhere in Europe.
Cases include a predawn arson attack March 23 that scorched ambulances in Golders Green operated by Hatzola, an emergency services company that serves the area’s Jewish population; attacks on April 15 in which incendiary devices were hurled at a synagogue and an Iranian broadcasting network; and an April 17 attempt by suspects wearing hazardous material suits to fly a drone carrying supposedly lethal materials into the Israeli embassy compound in Kensington.
At least 27 suspects have been arrested in these and other cases by U.K. authorities, said a British security official, who like others interviewed for this report spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive details. The cases are being handled by the Met’s Counter Terrorism Policing department and also involve the Iran unit of Britain’s MI5 domestic intelligence service.
No definitive links to Tehran have been established so far, British officials said. But “all good logic would point to Iran being behind this,” one official said.
If so, the attacks of the past two months would extend a period in which has Iran has emerged as the most persistent domestic threat in Britain. During an October speech outlining security issues, Ken McCallum, the director of MI5, said the agency had “tracked more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots” in a 12-month period.
In waging this campaign, Iran has adopted a playbook increasingly employed by Russia and other authoritarian regimes that involves the use of criminal syndicates and teens recruited online to carry out attacks that are difficult to trace and shield Iran’s own intelligence operatives — who face intense scrutiny in the West — from accountability, according to officials and experts.
In 2024, Iran or its proxies hired Romanian nationals to fly to London and stab a prominent Iranian journalist before fleeing the country, British prosecutors allege. Iran has employed similar tactics in the United States, including seeking to hire members of the Hells Angel’s biker gang to carry out contract killings.
Starmer appeared to acknowledge Wednesday that the danger is accelerating, citing his government’s “determination to deal with any of these offenses, the likes of which we’ve seen too much recently.”
Other British officials also condemned the violence.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan confirmed that an arrest had been made in what he described in a post on X as an “appalling attack on two Jewish Londoners in Golders Green.” Sarah Sackman, the Labour lawmaker for Finchley and Golders Green, thanked those who apprehended the suspect. “The attacks on British Jews are an attack on Britain itself,” she said in a post on X. “It is unconscionable that Jews are being targeted in this way.”
Shomrim, a volunteer Jewish security service that conducts patrols in Golders Green, said in a post online that its members had helped apprehend the suspect before police arrived to detain him. The organization said the suspect “was seen running along Golders Green Road armed with a knife and attempting to stab Jewish members of the public.”
It was not clear Wednesday evening whether the suspect had any ties to Iran or the online organization that has claimed responsibility for other attacks in Britain and Europe.
The organization, which is also known as “HAYI” for its Arabic acronym, first surfaced March 9, appearing on a Telegram channel associated with an Iraqi militia to declare “the start of its military operations against U.S. and Israeli interests around the world.”
Two days later it claimed responsibility for an attack in which an explosive was detonated in front of a synagogue in Belgium. Following attacks included the attempted firebombing of a synagogue in Rotterdam and a Jewish school in Amsterdam. Dutch authorities arrested five suspects in the Rotterdam attack whose ages ranged from 17 to 19.
The organization has at times made posts that contain errors or are intentionally misleading, British officials said. The group claimed responsibility for an attack in Greece, for example, but authorities can find no indication that such an attack occurred.
Other operations have seemed amateurish. Those who carried out the attempted drone attack on the Israeli embassy filmed the operation and posted video online that appeared to show their rigged aircraft crashing into a tree. They claimed the device was carrying lethal or radioactive material, but British officials said they found no evidence of a harmful payload.
Aspects of the HAYI’s profile suggest that it is linked to Iran or its proxies, according to officials and experts. The group’s logo, with a raised right fist clutching a rifle, resembles that of Hezbollah and other Iran-backed groups, though with a Soviet sniper weapon instead of an AK-47.
The timing of some of its social media posts also indicate advanced involvement in, or at least awareness of, attacks it claims to sponsor. The synagogue attack in Rotterdam took place at about 3:40 a.m. and a HAYI video claiming responsibility was posted less than 40 minutes later.
An assessment of the group by the International Center for Counter-Terrorism in the Netherlands said that these and other “patterns raise the question whether HAYI is a genuine terrorist group or merely serves as a facade for Iranian hybrid operations.”
Victoria Craw in London contributed to this report.
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