The Mossad was involved in Wednesday’s arrest of a Hamas-linked cell in Germany that planned to carry out attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets, the agency announced Friday.
The Israeli foreign intelligence service said the arrest was possible because of close coordination between the Mossad and Germany’s security and intelligence services.
German prosecutors said on Wednesday that they arrested three suspected foreign operatives of Hamas they believe were preparing a serious act of violence in Germany.
The three men are suspected by prosecutors of being involved in procuring firearms and ammunition for Hamas since at least the summer of this year, to be used for assassinations targeting Israeli or Jewish institutions in Germany.
“In the course of today’s arrests, various weapons, including an AK-47 assault rifle and several pistols, as well as a considerable amount of ammunition, were found,” said the federal prosecutors in a statement at the time.
The three, identified in line with German privacy laws only as German citizen Abed Al G., Wael F. M., born in Lebanon, and German citizen Ahmad I., were arrested in Berlin on Wednesday.
Anti-terrorism investigators had been surveilling the suspects for some time before operational forces nabbed them at a weapons handover in the German capital.
Police intervened in the exchange and discovered arms, including an AK-47 assault rifle, a Glock pistol and large amounts of ammunition, the prosecutor’s office said.
The Mossad said that the effort to stop the cell spanned several countries, and was “part of an extensive Mossad effort throughout Europe during which weapons caches were located and further arrests were made of operatives suspected of terrorist offenses.”
Hamas, which has been running Gaza and is backed by Iran, is designated as a terrorist organization by the European Union and several other countries, including the United States.
The terror group on Wednesday denied links to the three suspects in Germany, calling the allegations unfounded and saying its struggle is “confined to opposing Israeli occupation in Palestine.”
In February, four Hamas members suspected of plotting attacks on Jewish institutions in Europe went on trial in Berlin, in what prosecutors described as the first court case against Hamas terrorists in Germany.
Police in many European countries have been on heightened alert since the October 7 attack. Some forces have boosted security and patrols against possible attacks against Jewish or Israeli sites in recent months amid a spike in antisemitic violence on the continent and beyond.
The Mossad’s announcement Friday came in the wake of a terror attack in Manchester, England, in which a shooter targeted a synagogue on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, killing two people and seriously wounding more.
Germany, in particular, has kept security tight at synagogues and other Jewish institutions and is known to be one of Israel’s strongest allies, largely due to the legacy of the Holocaust.
Germany notably did not join France, Britain and several other Western countries last month in recognizing a Palestinian state — a move that both Israel and the Trump administration denounced as a reward for Hamas’s October 7 attack that started the ongoing Gaza war.