Three more governments, reporting separately
Italy, Belgium and Spain joined this archive in the past two days. None of the three cites the others. They are written by different services, in three languages, to three different parliaments and publics. That independence is the whole point of what follows.
Italy documents the mechanism — and names different actors
The recruitment section of this site argues something specific: that the conflict is the most effective recruitment engine these movements have in Europe. Italy’s intelligence service describes that mechanism directly in its own report to Parliament — and it is precise about whom it is describing:
“Il terrorismo jihadista ha tratto nuova linfa dallo scoppio del
conflitto tra Israele e Hamas e dall’effetto domino che ne è derivato. Tramite una
propaganda costruita ad arte, al Qaida e DAESH hanno sfruttato la crisi mediorientale per
ispirare soprattutto i giovani […] a compiere attacchi.”
DIS, Relazione sulla politica dell’informazione per la sicurezza (Anno 2024), p. 14 — “Jihadist terrorism drew new lifeblood from the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas conflict and the domino effect that followed. Through artfully constructed propaganda, al-Qaeda and DAESH exploited the Middle East crisis to inspire above all the young […] to carry out attacks.”
The report attaches a number to it: attacks carried out in Europe in 2024 doubled against 2023. It also notes that the attackers were mostly under thirty, in some cases minors, and mostly used knives rather than firearms or explosives — detail that a summary would lose.
The actors DIS names are al-Qaeda and Islamic State, not the Brotherhood-inspired current that the United Kingdom and France examined. Those are two different subjects, and this post keeps them apart. What Italy adds is independent evidence for the mechanism — that the conflict is being worked, deliberately and through constructed propaganda, to produce attacks in Europe. It adds nothing to the organisational question of who is linked to whom, and we do not stretch it that far.
An earlier version of this post carried the heading “Italy states the thesis this archive documents” and did not name al-Qaeda and DAESH in the surrounding text. That framing let a report about two proscribed terrorist organisations read as confirmation of a claim about a different movement. Corrected 2026-08-14, before publication. The accuracy and corrections page explains how we log these.
Belgium counts who was targeted
Belgium’s threat-assessment body received 287 threat reports in 2024, of which 213 fell within its remit. On who those threats were aimed at, the report is unambiguous:
“Throughout the year 2024, the general threat level 3 (serious) was in effect in Belgium. […] Jewish and the Israeli interests were the main target, followed by specific persons.”
CUTA, Annual Report 2024, p. 4
Set beside the EU Fundamental Rights Agency’s finding that 96% of Jewish respondents encountered antisemitism in the year before its survey, these are two instruments pointing at the same thing from opposite ends: one counts what a security service was warned about, the other asks the people concerned what they lived through.
Spain shows the mechanism in operation
Spain contributes something the other two do not: a count of enforcement rather than of threat. Its intelligence centre against terrorism and organised crime became, in April 2023, the first body in any European country to use the takedown powers under EU Regulation 2021/784.
“El Centro de Inteligencia contra el Terrorismo y el Crimen
Organizado (CITCO) del Ministerio del Interior emitió 134 órdenes de retirada de contenidos
terroristas en redes sociales entre los años 2023 y 2024 […] el 65 por ciento corresponde a
informaciones relacionadas con la propaganda yihadista.”
La Moncloa, 24 July 2025 — 134 takedown orders across 2023–24, 65% of them jihadist propaganda; the rest ultranationalist, racist or xenophobic material.
That last clause matters and we keep it. The same enforcement body, applying the same regulation, directed roughly a third of its orders at violent extremism of an entirely different kind.
What cuts the other way
Belgium’s own report, in the same pages quoted above, records that right-wing extremism was the second-largest category in its threat database, and that left-wing extremist activity rose over the same Gaza conflict — with a higher level of activity but, it notes, without real acts of violence. Belgium also had no terrorist attack on its territory in 2024 at all.
None of that is a footnote we are obliged to include. It is part of what the document says, and a reader who checks our citation will find it in the first two pages they open. An archive that made them discover it themselves would have earned the suspicion.
Why independence is the argument
Any one government report can be dismissed as politics — the product of one interior ministry, one governing coalition, one national debate. That dismissal gets harder when five states document the subject independently, in five languages, under governments of different political colours, without citing one another.
But independence is only worth invoking if the findings are described accurately, so here is what actually overlaps and what does not. The United Kingdom (2015) and France (2025) examined the same movement — the Muslim Brotherhood and its European networks — and reached findings that rhyme, each with its own stated limits. Italy (2025) documents a different set of actors, al-Qaeda and Islamic State, working the same conflict for recruitment. Belgium (2024) and Spain (2025) contribute measurement rather than characterisation: who was threatened, and what was taken down. Stacking those five into a single claim would be the exact move this archive exists to refuse.
It is also why this archive quotes their limits as carefully as their conclusions. France recorded that no recent document shows an intent to establish an Islamic state there, and that the threat it identified does not resort to violent action. Sweden lowered its national threat level in the same period others held theirs. Belgium logged a year with no attack. Those sentences were written by the same services, and they are in the register too.