Jerusalem sources deny claim Israeli police failed to attend key West Midlands force meeting on Maccabi fan ban

“It is unfortunate the Israeli police representative did not attend this meeting as it was a missed opportunity to exchange intelligence to inform planning”, the comment said.

However, Israeli diplomatic sources have rejected the assertions in the document and claimed the Israel Police were not invited to the meeting at all.

"The Israel Police representative responsible for Budapest and that deals with coordinating security matters relating to Israeli supporters was not invited to this meeting and was not informed that it was taking place”, they told the JC.

It was in the same document that intelligence references revealed “elements of the community in West Midlands wanting to ‘arm’ themselves”, something the West Midlands Police Chief Constable Craig Guildford only publicly disclosed when questioned by MPs on Tuesday.

Guildford said he only revealed the information to the Home Affairs Select Committee because “this is the first time specifically that you’ve asked for that detail”.

Labour MP Joani Reid, a fellow committee member and chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Antisemitism, responded incredulously that the answer was “absolutely outrageous”.

Pressure is mounting on West Midlands Police, who are accused of painting an exaggerated picture of the threats posed by the Israeli fans to justify their ban from Birmingham.

In November, the JC first revealed that official Dutch accounts of incidents in Amsterdam involving Maccabi fans disputed many of West Midlands Police’s assertions.

Both the Dutch police and the mayor of Amsterdam disputed the British force’s account of events.

Despite this, at an earlier session of the Home Affairs Select Committee in December, Guildford claimed that: “I suspect there was lots of pressure locally on the Dutch police as a result of this match. My very careful conclusion … is that I think initially the Dutch probably underestimated the level of threat and risk.

However, in recent days, both the mayor of Amsterdam and the Dutch Justice and Security Inspectorate have rejected those assertions and backed their accounts of events, which saw Maccabi fans being subject to organised intimidation and violence, planned in WhatsApp messages in which participants talked of a “Jew hunt”.

In a letter to Conservative MP Nick Timothy and unaffiliated peer – and JC Director – Lord Austin, published on Tuesday, Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema denied that police in the city were “under pressure to change any of the facts, which were already public and generally known well before the decision to ban supporters in the UK”.

She added: “Any suggestion otherwise is nonsensical”.

Two days beforehand, similar points were made by the Dutch Justice and Security Inspectorate, who told Timothy and Austin: "We do not see any new facts or circumstances that would warrant revising these findings or reopening the investigation."

Guildford is facing mounting calls to resign as the chief constable of West Midlands Police.

After the session in front of MPs on Tuesday, Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch said his position was “untenable”.

“West Midlands Police capitulated to Islamists and then collaborated with them to cover it up. They knew extremists were planning to attack Jews for going to a football match, and their response was to blame and remove Jewish people instead”, the Tory leader added in a post on X.

The Jewish Leadership Council and Board of Deputies also called for Guildford to go, claiming that “significant harm has been done to the confidence of the Jewish community in the Police” and that “Action must be taken to ensure that these failures do not recur and to restore trust.”

The communal groups also called on the government to intervene to remove Guildford if he refuses to step aside voluntarily.