Chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed Thursday that Germany will start deporting criminals from Afghanistan and Syria again after a knife attack by an Afghan immigrant last week left one police officer dead and four more people injured.

The brutal attack in Mannheim, which was captured on video and quickly went viral online, shocked the country, Associated News reported.

Scholz addressed parliament in a speech focused on security Thursday, just days before European elections in which far-right populists across the continent are expected to make big gains.

“It outrages me when someone who has sought protection here commits the most serious crimes. Such criminals should be deported, even if they come from Syria and Afghanistan,” the chancellor said to the applause of lawmakers.

The 25-year-old attacker, who killed a 29-year-old police officer who was trying to stop him, came to Germany in 2014 as an asylum-seeker, AP reported.

“Serious criminals and terrorist threats have no place here,” Scholz added. “In such cases, Germany’s security interests outweigh the interests of the perpetrator.”

Migration has been one of the major topics during the European election campaign that far-right and mainstream parties have been exploiting in order to garner votes from Europeans who have felt disgruntled by millions of new arrivals looking for refuge from wars, hunger, climate change or just trying to build up a better future for themselves.

Referring to Friday’s knife attack, Scholz said that “what happened in Mannheim — the fatal knife attack on a young policeman — is an expression of the misanthropic ideology of radical Islamism. There is only one term for this: terror. Let’s declare war to terror.”

Germany does not currently carry out any deportations to Afghanistan or Syria.

The chancellor said in his speech that his government was already working on solutions to enable the deportation of convicted Afghans to Afghanistan’s neighboring countries. There have been discussions in Germany about allowing deportations to Syria again.

Scholz also promised that deportation rules for all others who commit or support terrorism will be toughened as well.

Many Germans initially welcomed migrants when more than 1 million people from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq came in 2015-16 following wars and instability in their home countries, but the mood has changed in recent years, AP reported.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday called for Moscow to “build up” relations with the Islamic Emirate government in Afghanistan.

Speaking to senior editors of foreign news agencies on the sidelines of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, Putin said: “We have always believed that we need to deal with reality. The Taliban are in power in Afghanistan… We have to build up relations with the Taliban government.”

This comes after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said last week that Moscow planned to take the Islamic Emirate off its list of banned terrorist organizations.

“They are the real power” in Afghanistan, Lavrov said at the time, speaking during a visit by Putin to Uzbekistan in Central Asia.

The Islamic Emirate has been designated a terrorist organization in Russia since 2003.
Abdulmanan Omari, Afghanistan’s acting minister of labor and social affairs, is meanwhile attending this year’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

According to the ministry, Omari left for Russia on Wednesday morning.

Israel targeted a Gaza school on Thursday that it said contained a Hamas compound, killing fighters involved in the Oct. 7 attack that sparked the eight-month war, but Gaza media said the strike killed at least 27 people seeking shelter.

Ismail Al-Thawabta, the director of the Hamas-run government media office, rejected Israel’s claims that the U.N. school in Nuseirat, in central Gaza, had hidden a Hamas command post.

“The occupation uses lying to the public opinion through false fabricated stories to justify the brutal crime it conducted against dozens of displaced people,” Thawabta told Reuters.

Israel’s military said that before the strike by Israeli fighter jets, the military took steps to reduce the risk of harm to civilians.

The attack happened after Israel announced a new military campaign in central Gaza as it battles a group of fighters relying on hit-and-run insurgency tactics. Israel has said there will be no halt to fighting during ceasefire talks.

In an apparent blow to a truce proposal touted last week by U.S. President Joe Biden, the leader of Hamas on Wednesday said the group would demand a permanent end to the war in Gaza and Israeli withdrawal as part of a ceasefire plan.

The remarks by Ismail Haniyeh appeared to deliver the Palestinian militant group’s reply to the proposal that Biden unveiled last week. Washington had said it was waiting to hear an answer from Hamas to what Biden described as an Israeli initiative.

“The movement and factions of the resistance will deal seriously and positively with any agreement that is based on a comprehensive ending of the aggression and the complete withdrawal and prisoners swap,” Haniyeh said.

Asked whether Haniyeh’s remarks amounted to the group’s reply to Biden, a senior Hamas official replied to a text message from Reuters with a “thumbs up” emoji.

Since a brief week-long truce in November, all attempts to arrange a ceasefire have failed, with Hamas insisting on its demand for a permanent end to the conflict, while Israel says it is prepared to discuss only temporary pauses until the militant group is defeated.

Washington is still pressing hard to reach an agreement. CIA director William Burns met senior officials from mediators Qatar and Egypt on Wednesday in Doha to discuss the ceasefire proposal.

Biden has repeatedly declared that ceasefires were close over the past several months, only for no truce to materialise.

Last week’s announcement came with far greater fanfare from the White House, and at a time when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under mounting domestic political pressure to chart a path to end the eight-month-old war and negotiate the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas.

Hamas, which rules Gaza, precipitated the war by attacking Israeli territory on Oct. 7, killing around 1,200 people and capturing more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. Around half of the hostages were freed in the war’s only truce so far, which lasted a week in November.

Israel’s military assault on Gaza has killed more than 36,000 people, according to health officials in the territory, who say thousands more dead are feared buried under the rubble.

Meanwhile, a conflict between Israel and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah is threatening to escalate, with the U.S. State Department warning against a full-blown war.

ISRAEL LUKEWARM

Although Biden described the ceasefire proposal as an Israeli offer, Israel’s government has been lukewarm in public. A top Netanyahu aide confirmed on Sunday that Israel had made the proposal even though it was “not a good deal”.

Far-right members of Netanyahu’s government have pledged to quit if he agrees to a peace deal that leaves Hamas in place, a move that could force a new election and end the political career of Israel’s longest-serving leader.

Centrist opponents who joined Netanyahu’s war cabinet in a show of unity at the outset of the conflict have also threatened to quit, saying his government has no plan.

Meanwhile, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said there would be no let-up in Israel’s offensive while negotiations over the ceasefire proposal were under way.

“Any negotiations with Hamas would be conducted only under fire,” Gallant said in remarks carried by Israeli media after he flew aboard a warplane to inspect the Gaza front.

The armed wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad said they had fought gun battles with Israeli forces on Wednesday in areas throughout the enclave and fired anti-tank rockets and shells.

Two children were among the dead laid out on Wednesday in the city’s Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, one of the last hospitals functioning in Gaza. Mourners said the children had been killed along with their mother, who had been unable to leave when others in the neighbourhood did.

“This is not war, it is destruction that words are unable to express,” said their father Abu Mohammed Abu Saif.