UK ministers will hold an emergency meeting of its Cobra committee amid concerns that the Israel-Gaza conflict has raised the possibility of a domestic terrorist incident.
The home secretary, Suella Braverman, will meet national security officials and police at No 10 on Monday to assess the security risk after the deadly Hamas attack on Israel more than three weeks ago.
Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, chaired a Cobra meeting on Thursday with figures from the Foreign Office, Ministry of Defence and Cabinet Office to discuss delivering aid to Gaza.
Monday’s meeting of senior ministers and officials would be the first to specifically discuss any possible terror threat, sources said. Any decision on whether to raise the level will not be made by the committee – that is a decision for the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre.
The meeting will take place after the UK’s most senior police officer warned that events in the Middle East were having a serious knock-on effect in Britain.
Asked on Times Radio how worried people should be about an increased risk of terrorism in the UK, the education minister, Robert Halfon, said: “Well, I can’t answer for that. I’m not at that Cobra meeting. I’m sure it will be announced later on. But, of course, we have to make sure that British citizens are safe and secure from the threat of terrorism, as the government always does.”
Braverman has previously written to police officers urging them to clamp down on any attempts to use flags, songs or swastikas to harass or intimidate Jewish people.
In remarks that have prompted concern from human rights lawyers and police forces, she wrote: “I would encourage police to consider whether chants such as: ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ should be understood as an expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world.
“Behaviours that are legitimate in some circumstances, for example the waving of a Palestinian flag, may not be legitimate such as when intended to glorify acts of terrorism.”
Halfon, who is Jewish, said hearing people chanting “from the river to the sea” was “horrific” and “scary”.
‘It’s frightening for Jewish people in England at the moment, you know,” he added. “I really welcome that the prime minister has done everything possible to support those of the Jewish faith, but it is frightening when you hear those chants … when you hear cries of jihad every week in central London. It is frightening.
“When you hear that Jewish schools have to close their doors, when you hear of students – I am the universities minister as well – I get messages from Jewish chaplaincy service in higher education that Jewish students are having Palestinian flags draped over their cars, or doors knocked on of the Jewish chaplain, with people … saying ‘we know where you live’,” he said.
Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan police commissioner, said his force was facing a “particularly challenging time” after an increase in activity from Iranian-backed groups in the UK.
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Highlighting the scale of the risk from events in the Middle East, Rowley told Sky News on Sunday: “When you’ve got state threats from Iran, you’ve got terrorism being accelerated by the events and hate crime in communities.
“For Jewish communities, it’s now about 14-fold increase in antisemitism in London, and for Muslim communities it’s nearly threefold. So this is really precarious. In the middle of it, we’ve got these big protests.”
Nearly 100 arrests have been made in London since Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October. Rowley predicted there would be “many, many more arrests” over in the coming days as officers tracked down people who had breached public order and terrorism laws at recent protests.
On Sunday, five people were charged with offences, including displaying an illegal placard and assaulting a police officer, after the third consecutive weekend of mass pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the capital on Saturday.
The threat level in England, Wales and Scotland is “substantial”, meaning a terrorist attack is likely. It has been at this level since 9 February last year, when it was lowered from “severe”, meaning highly likely.
