ISIS used its weekly propaganda outlet al-Naba to urge followers worldwide to set fire to churches and synagogues during Easter weekend, framing the call as retaliation for Israel's closure of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. The threat named targets across the United States, Europe, Russia, India, and several Muslim-majority nations, a sweeping incitement to arson and mass violence timed to one of Christianity's holiest weekends.
The translated message, reported by The US Sun, addressed "Muslims everywhere" and told them to "rise up and set fire to the Jewish synagogues scattered across America, Europe, Russia, India, and elsewhere." It went further, naming specific regions where it said synagogue locations "are well-known" and "have been published", including Tunisia, Morocco, the UAE, and Syria.
The propaganda did not stop at synagogues. Churches around the world were also named as targets. And the timing, Easter weekend, when millions of Christians gather for worship, was no accident.
Israeli authorities said they closed the al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third holiest site, because of the "security situation" amid what the reporting described as the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran. Mass gatherings were also banned at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Western Wall in Jerusalem. ISIS seized on the mosque closure as its stated justification for the global call to violence.
The full al-Naba passage, as translated and reported by the New York Post, declared:
"In the face of the tragedy of the closure of the blessed al-Aqsa Mosque, it is incumbent upon Muslims everywhere, those who yearn to come to the aid of the site of their Prophet's Night Journey, to rise up and set fire to the Jewish synagogues scattered across America, Europe, Russia, India, and elsewhere."
The message continued: "The same applies to the synagogues in Tunisia, Morocco, the UAE, and Syria; their locations are well-known, and their details have been published."
That language amounts to operational guidance, not vague rhetoric. ISIS was telling potential attackers where to look and what to do.
ISIS propagandists also held up the Bondi Beach massacre in Australia as an example for followers to emulate. The attack, which the reporting places in December, killed at least 15 people, including a 10-year-old girl, and wounded dozens more as members of the Sydney Jewish community celebrated Hanukkah.
The gunmen, identified as 50-year-old Sajid Akram and his 24-year-old son Naveed, are said to have draped an Islamic State flag over the hood of their car before opening fire on a crowd of roughly 1,000 people. Authorities believe suspected shooter Naveed had pledged allegiance to ISIS before the attack.
ISIS followers were ordered to attack "Jewish gatherings" around the world and to "emulate the actions of the 'Sydney Heroes'", the terror group's term for the Bondi Beach gunmen. That kind of lionizing language is designed to recruit the next attacker. It has worked before.
The broader security environment makes the threat harder to dismiss. Recent domestic incidents, including a synagogue shooting and an ISIS-linked attack in two U.S. states, underscore that the threat to American houses of worship is not theoretical.
The Easter call was not issued in a vacuum. ISIS claimed in the same period to have killed 60 people across 15 separate operations in the preceding week alone. That figure is an ISIS claim and cannot be independently verified from the available reporting, but it signals the group's intent to project operational momentum.
The group has a pattern of timing propaganda campaigns to religious holidays and major international events. In 2024, ISIS released a poster showing a terrorist flying an "armed drone" toward the Eiffel Tower, timed to threaten the Paris Olympics. The poster carried the caption: "Lone wolves' Olympics have begun with the Will of Allah."
The pattern is consistent: identify a high-profile gathering, issue a public threat, and hope that someone, anywhere, answers the call.
Escalating tensions in the Middle East have only sharpened the risk. The ongoing friction between the U.S. and its NATO allies over Iran operations adds a volatile backdrop to any ISIS propaganda campaign anchored in the region's conflicts.
General Mazloum Abdi, who leads the Kurdish-led, U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, has sounded the alarm over ISIS's resurgence. In an interview conducted with documentarian and ex-soldier Alan Duncan, Abdi warned that 10,000 male ISIS fighters currently sit in prisons, and are ready to "bring devastation back to the Middle East" if freed.
Earlier this year, reporting indicated ISIS could unleash a new wave of terror by springing fighters from camps. Abdi's warning puts a number on the scale of the problem: ten thousand trained, radicalized men, held in facilities that depend on continued international support and attention.
That support is not guaranteed. Intelligence and security tensions inside the administration have raised questions about how effectively the U.S. is tracking and countering the evolving ISIS threat, questions that matter more, not less, when the group is issuing public calls for mass-casualty attacks on American soil.
Several questions hang over the threat. The exact date and issue of al-Naba that carried the translated language have not been specified. No direct link or image of the original Arabic-language material has been published in the available reporting. The precise date of the Bondi Beach attack in December is not confirmed in these accounts, nor is the identity of the "authorities" who believe Naveed pledged allegiance to ISIS before the shooting.
None of those gaps erase the core fact: ISIS published a specific, geographically detailed call for arson attacks on churches and synagogues, timed to Easter, and distributed it through its established propaganda channels.
The question for American law enforcement and intelligence agencies is not whether ISIS means what it says. The group's track record answers that. The question is whether the country is positioned to stop the lone actor who takes the call seriously.
And the broader question, one that some in the intelligence establishment seem more interested in dodging than answering, is whether the institutions tasked with protecting Americans are focused on the right threats, or distracted by political fights that have nothing to do with the safety of a single church or synagogue.
ISIS has not been "defeated" in any meaningful sense of the word. It has adapted. It uses propaganda outlets to issue operational guidance in plain language. It celebrates mass killings and names the perpetrators as heroes. It times its campaigns to holidays when the maximum number of worshippers will be gathered in the maximum number of vulnerable locations.
Churches and synagogues are soft targets by nature. They are open. They are welcoming. They are not fortified. And they are filled, on Easter Sunday, with families who came to pray, not to worry about whether someone read al-Naba this week.
When a terror organization publishes a target list and a timetable, the civilized response is not to debate the nuances of their grievance. It is to take them at their word and act accordingly.
