Serbia is on its highest terror alert after a teenager armed with two knives attacked a police officer guarding Israel's embassy in Belgrade just after midnight on Wednesday and was shot dead at the scene. The attacker, a minor who has not been formally identified, pulled open the door of the guard booth outside the embassy at about 12:15 a.m. local time and charged at the officer inside, dressed in black and shouting "Allahu Akbar" — "God is great" in Arabic — according to Interior Minister Ivica Dacic. Prosecutors say the attacker threw one of his knives at the officer, hitting him in the left cheek, before the officer drew his service weapon and fired several shots, killing the assailant on the spot.
The officer, identified only by the initials D.S., is a member of the Gendarmerie, the elite police unit that guards the embassy around the clock. He was slightly wounded in the face. Belgrade's Higher Public Prosecutor's Office said the shooting was justified and in self-defence, and that its investigation is continuing. Dacic said the officer was in good spirits and would be allowed to go home the same day. No embassy staff were hurt: the mission was closed for the night when the attack came.
Dacic, who serves in the outgoing caretaker government, said police are treating the incident as a terrorist attack and that he has raised Serbia's terror threat level to red, the highest there is. "Given that the terrorist attack took place on our territory, as the Minister of Internal Affairs responsible for this, I have raised the level of the terrorist threat to the highest possible level; namely to the red level," he said. Police presence has been stepped up at key locations across the country, and police photographs from the scene showed the guard's booth sealed off with tape as heavily armed officers stood guard in the surrounding streets through Wednesday.
What the red level means in daily life is more armed police in the places ordinary people pass through: shopping centres, railway stations, airports, public buildings and diplomatic missions, with tighter security checks at sensitive sites. For families in Belgrade, for commuters and for travellers flying in and out of Serbia, the attack has turned an ordinary Wednesday into a day of visible patrols and longer checks — the price of making sure there is no second attack while investigators work out who the teenager was and whether anyone stood behind him.
On the attacker's identity, officials are working from suspicion rather than established fact. Dacic said the teenager is believed to have come from Sabac, a town in western Serbia, but his identity and exact age have not been established. The minister said Serbia's security agencies had already been monitoring him, described him as a supporter of the Islamic State group, and said "he kept the black flag in support of the Islamic State on his Instagram" account. Those are the minister's claims, made within hours of the attack; no evidence supporting them has been published, and whether the teenager acted alone or had help from anyone else is not yet known. No arrests or searches connected to the attack had been reported by Wednesday evening.
Israel confirmed the attack on its mission the same day. The foreign ministry in Jerusalem called it an "attempted terrorist attack" and said the matter is under investigation by the Serbian authorities. "The attacker was neutralized by local police," the ministry said. "No embassy personnel were injured, and the mission was closed at the time of the incident, which occurred late at night." Israel's ambassador to Serbia later condemned the attack as an attempted terror strike on the embassy and thanked the wounded guard. The embassy sits in an upscale district of the capital, not far from the United States Embassy, and is guarded by the Gendarmerie with officers carrying automatic weapons. Serbia has kept close relations with Israel, and attacks on the mission draw an immediate response in both capitals.
It is the second time in just over two years that a guard at this same embassy has had to shoot his way out of an attack. In June 2024, an assailant armed with a crossbow shot a Serbian police officer in the neck outside the embassy; that officer also survived and killed his attacker. Two lone attackers, two years apart, against the same guard post is exactly the pattern security services find hardest to stop: no network to infiltrate, no plot to intercept — only a watchlist, and in this case the minister says the teenager was already on one. Why a young man known to the agencies could still reach the booth door with two knives is a question Serbian officials will have to answer in public, and it is the question that matters most for the safety of everyone else the red alert is meant to protect.
The timing adds a political edge, though no official has claimed any link between the attack and the politics of the week. Serbia held an early parliamentary election on Sunday in which a youth-led movement defeated the long-ruling camp of former President Aleksandar Vucic after almost two years of protests against him. The new government has not yet been formed, so Vucic's allies still control the police, and it is a caretaker interior minister who has ordered the country's highest state of alert. Israel, for its part, voted on Tuesday in a parliamentary election that exit polls said produced no clear winner. Neither government has suggested the attacker chose his moment for either vote.
What is known is the sequence at the booth: a teenager in black, two knives, one thrown blade that cut an officer's cheek, and shots fired in self-defence that left the attacker dead where he fell. What is not known is almost everything behind it — his name, his age, his road from Sabac to that doorway, and whether the Islamic State connection the minister describes was inspiration, contact, or something in between. Until the investigation answers those questions, Serbia stays on red: more police on the streets, tighter checks at the places crowds gather, and a guard post in Belgrade that has now twice had to defend itself in the middle of the night.
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