Police in Milan arrested a Pakistani man on Monday for allegedly assaulting a Jewish tourist from the United States.
Train conductors subdued the 25-year-old suspect at Milan’s central railway station after the attack. Police then arrested him on charges of aggravated assault motivated by racial, ethnic and religious discrimination, Italy’s RAI news agency reported.
According to the Il Giorno daily, the victim belonged to a group of 10 tourists, all of them Orthodox Jews from the United States. The victim was consulting a departures board when the suspect began accosting him over how “children are killed in Gaza.” The assailant then allegedly chased the victim, hitting him in the head before being subdued.
The suspect arrived in Italy on Sunday on a train from Switzerland, the report said. It was not immediately clear whether he had been living in Italy, though some documents listed him as residing in Trento, northeast of Milan, prior to the attack.
The president of Milan’s Jewish community, Walker Meghnagi, told Il Giorno that “many Jewish tourists, particularly Americans but not only, avoid coming to Milan precisely because of the climate of hatred and the fear of being attacked.”
In September, an Israeli woman and her American husband were chased down a Venice street by 12 Arabs who shouted “Free Palestine” at them.
The Arab men accosted the Jewish couple—identifiable by their ultra-Orthodox attire—on the street and shouted antisemitic insults, including pro-Palestinian slogans, the victims said. One of the assailants allegedly used a dog to intimidate the couple.
Last year, documented antisemitic incidents in Italy rose from 455 in 2023 to 877. The annual report by the Antisemitism Observatory of the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Center Foundation, a Jewish community watchdog, said that both the scale of the increase and the levels reached in 2024 were unprecedented.
“Antisemitism in Italy has reached unprecedented levels,” the authors of the observatory’s report wrote. About a third of the incidents recorded last year occurred through physical interactions, while the remainder involved threats and hate speech online.
In an SWG poll conducted Sept. 24–26 among 800 adults in Italy, about 15% of respondents said they believed that physical assaults on Jewish people are “entirely or fairly justifiable.” Antisemitic graffiti was considered “acceptable” by 18%, while around 20% said it was reasonable to attack pro-Israel professors or for businesses to refuse service to Israeli customers.
