Amid Israel's war on Gaza, the intelligence community and the FBI say that the threat of Islamic terrorist attacks inside the U.S. is at its highest point since 9/11, reports The Intercept. Although FBI officials cited Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and ISIS as making new threats against the U.S., the bureau is more focused on "homegrown" terror as the primary threat. FBI Director Christopher Wray told the House Committee on Homeland Security that homegrown violent extremists, or HVEs, posed the single greatest immediate foreign terrorist threat to the United States.
HVEs are lone actors that are disconnected from the extremist groups they tend to be inspired to commit violence. Wray said small scale, "lone wolf" attacks are likely. Multiple terrorist groups — including ISIS and al-Qa’ida — have leveraged the crisis to generate propaganda designed to inspire followers to conduct attacks, including in North America. Wray said that after months of chasing down leads, his counterterrorism division has started “to see those numbers level off,” adding that “we expect that October 7 and the conflict that’s followed will feed a pipeline of radicalization and mobilization for years to come.”
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