Police in Antwerp, Belgium, arrested six people on Sunday, including a 17-year-old, on suspicion of conspiring to attack Jews from the city’s heavily haredi community.
The suspects were apprehended after exchanging messages on social media following the assault of dozens of Israelis in Holland’s capital of Amsterdam, Belgian police officials told De Morgen daily on Monday.
The incident in Antwerp coincided with concern that the assaults in the Netherlands—the country’s biggest series of antisemitic assaults in decades—mark the beginning of a new wave of coordinated attacks by Muslims in Europe against their Jewish neighbors.
“Some young individuals agreed to perpetrate a similar action in Antwerp in the Jewish Quarter, which is why we heightened security,” the city’s police commissioner Wouter Bruyns told De Morgen.
Following the arrests, footage of the beating of a haredi Jew in Antwerp in October surfaced on social media on Sunday. It shows three males following a Haredi male, shouting “Free Palestine” and beating him.
The victim is 14 years old, according to Michael Freilich, a Jewish federal lawmaker from Antwerp. The family did not file a police complaint “as this is a regular occurrence in town,” he told JNS on Monday.
The teenager received bruises from the beating. His family has decided to file a police complaint following the video’s surfacing, Freilich said.
Separately, the Dutch parliament is set to hold an emergency debate on Tuesday on last week’s assaults in Amsterdam. At least 100 young Muslim men participated in the preplanned attacks on Israeli soccer fans leaving a match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and the local Ajax team. Israeli President Isaac Herzog called the event a “pogrom,” as did many local Jews including Herman Loonstein, a prominent lawyer.
Geert Wilders, the leader of the Party for Freedom, the largest party in the Netherlands and part of the ruling coalition, demanded that the perpetrators be deported. He also demanded an emergency debate to discuss how the assaults were made possible and again after hearing that all 62 detainees in police custody were arrested before or after the assaults, but none during them. He also called the incident a “pogrom.”
Israel’s National Security Council on Sunday advised Israelis not to travel to international soccer matches in Europe this week. Kan News reported Friday that the Mossad intelligence service had warned Dutch authorities of a threat to Israelis and Jews in the Netherlands ahead of the soccer game.
But Dutch Justice Minister David van Weel denied this on Monday, the AD news site reported.
The Israeli national team will compete against France in Saint-Denis, just north of Paris, on Thursday, in a UEFA Nations League match.
‘They were waiting for us’
As many as 2,000 Israelis returned to Israel on eight emergency flights out of Amsterdam over the weekend, El Al, Israel’s flag carrier airline, reported.
The assaults, which Dutch King Willem-Alexander and Prime Minister Dick Schoof reportedly both said were a source of “shame,” featured scenes that many found reminiscent of the wholesale persecution of Jews before and during the Holocaust. Many critics of the incidents noted they happened on the eve of the anniversary of the Kristallnacht Nazi pogroms of 1938 in the Third Reich.
Some victims were made to beg for mercy on their knees and say “Free Palestine.” Others, including at least one woman, were set upon by men without any verbal exchange. At least one man jumped into a canal to escape his attackers; another was hit by a vehicle in a suspected car-ramming. According to reports, attackers asked to check the passports of people they confronted on the street to see if they were Israeli.
About 25 people were injured in the assaults, with their injuries ranging from moderate to minor.
One victim, an IDF reservist who recently fought Hamas in Gaza, told Israel’s Channel 12 on Monday that he and his friend Ben tried to flee their attackers by entering a bar but were “kicked out.”
They ordered a taxi via Uber, he said, “but from an alleyway, another group of 10 men ran to us with clubs. They punched Ben and clubbed him in his back. I went berserk and jumped at them, but they busted me up. Broke my teeth. I feared for my life. I saw they were waiting for us at every corner. It was all planned.”
The perpetrators belonged primarily to six groups in the Netherlands, according to a Nov. 8 report by the Network Contagion Research Institute, or NCRI, a nonprofit that deals with identifying and forecasting the threat and spread of misinformation and disinformation across social-media platforms.
The dominant group identified as PGNL, a Dutch-language acronym for “The Palestinian Community in the Netherlands.”
It is headed by Ayman Nejmeh, whom NCRI said was managing PGNL social media. According to his social media profiles, he is a Syrian-born former teacher for UNRWA, the U.N. aid agency for Palestinians, which has been thoroughly infiltrated by Hamas and, according to Israel, was complicit in the Oct. 7, 2023, massacres in the northwestern Negev. Nejmeh removed the UNRWA affiliation from his social media accounts following the assaults in Amsterdam.
ELNET, the European Leadership Network—a pro-Israel nonprofit—identified PGNL in a report published last month as one of 15 entities it described as composed of “Hamas-affiliated individuals and organizations in Europe” connected to Hamas representative Amin Abu Rashed, head of the Conference of Palestinians in Europe.
Contacted by JNS for a reaction, Nejmeh did not immediately reply to a request for comment about the allegations regarding the Hamas affiliation, and about his ties to UNRWA.
‘Sharing photos of their Jew hunt’
On Sunday, Dutch police arrested dozens of people for attending an unauthorized anti-Israel protest at Dam Square, the site where many of the assaults on Israeli soccer fans happened. Among the detainees was Jazie Veldhuyzen, a member of the Amsterdam City Council.
Protesters splintered off from the protest into the Nieuwndijk shopping street. Shopkeepers held up cell phone screens displaying the PLO flag in solidarity with the marchers, Bart Schut, the deputy editor-in-chief of the NIW Dutch-Jewish weekly, documented, including at the Ici Paris XL outlet store.
In the Dutch media, prominent opinion shapers downplayed the incident and noted disruptive behavior by Maccabi fans in the days before the match. Amsterdam police chief Peter Holla at a press conference said Maccabi fans damaged a taxi cab and stole a Palestinian flag from a building facade. Fans were filmed chanting, “Let the IDF win” and “F**k the Arabs.”
Marcel van Roosmalen, a columnist for the high-brow NRC daily, penned an op-ed titled “Shameless” in which he argued that if the assaults were a “pogrom, then what’s happening in Gaza is a genocide.” But he also urged left-wing politicians to condemn the violence against Israelis, in which we “clearly know who the perpetrators are: They are sharing photos of their Jew hunt.”
Veldhuyzen, the councilman for the BIJ1 party, which says it promotes anti-racist policies but has often been accused of espousing antisemitism, blamed the Maccabi fans for the assault against them.
“Video footage of armed Maccabi-hooligans, attacking people from Amsterdam that look like Arabs or Muslims with metal pipes, stones and fireworks. All under the protection of the Dutch police. Here you have your ‘victims,'” he wrote on X. He was referencing footage showing men running, some holding elongated objects, in the center of Amsterdam, near where Arab men had attacked the Israelis.
It is not clear whether the footage was taken before or after the assaults by the Muslims began and who is seen carrying elongated objects in it.
Following the Hamas-led onslaught on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which terrorists murdered some 1,200 people and abducted another 251, the IDF went to war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Israel’s critics in Europe have accused it of perpetrating genocide, including at weekly rallies in European capitals that have featured numerous calls for violence against Israelis and Jews. Several countries reported an explosion in recorded antisemitic incidents. In the Netherlands, the Center for Information and Documentation recorded an increase of 245% in antisemitic incidents in 2023 over 2022.