Prosecutors in Paris indicted on Aug. 1 two Muslim teenagers, aged 15 and 17, for plotting terrorist attacks on a synagogue and the Eiffel Tower, French media reported on Wednesday.
Police arrested the defendants, both admirers of the Islamic State terrorist group, on July 29 and 30, respectively, according to a report by Le Figaro, which the AFP news agency confirmed. Police reportedly began monitoring the defendants in April.
They corresponded online about waging jihad, according to the report.
The report neither identified the defendants nor indicated how they pleaded.
Last year saw the most antisemitic physical assaults in France in more than a decade, with 106 reported cases documented by the SPCJ (Service de protection de la communauté juive). Most antisemitic incidents in France are perpetrated by Muslims or people from Muslim-majority countries or backgrounds, according to the BNVCA (Bureau national de vigilance contre l’antisémitisme).
The total number of antisemitic acts recorded last year—1,570—has slightly decreased from the 1,676 reported the previous year, but the 2024 tally is still one of the highest on record. In the years 2012-2022, France saw an average of 540 antisemitic incidents annually.
The Hamas-led murders of Oct. 7, 2023, in Israel triggered an increase in antisemitic rhetoric and violence in France and throughout Western Europe and beyond. In the month that followed the attacks, more than 1,000 antisemitic acts were documented in France, then-Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said.
The U.S. ambassador to France, Charles Kushner, in an open letter published on Sunday in The Wall Street Journal, criticized the government of French President Emmanuel Macron for its alleged lack of action amid a sharp increase in Jew-hatred in the country.
In the piece, Kushner expressed his “deep concern over the dramatic rise of antisemitism in France and the lack of sufficient action by your government to confront it.” The letter goes on to state that “not a day passes without Jews assaulted in the street, synagogues or schools defaced, or Jewish-owned businesses vandalized.”
Antisemitism has “long scarred French life,” Kushner wrote, but has “exploded” since the Oct. 7 massacre and amid the subsequent war in Gaza.
He accused Macron of contributing to the escalating antisemitism through his harsh criticism of Israeli actions during nearly two years of war and by announcing intentions to recognize a Palestinian state at the U.N. General Assembly annual meeting in September.
Such moves “embolden extremists, fuel violence and endanger Jewish life in France,” Kushner wrote.
The French Foreign Ministry dismissed the allegations and protested the fact that the U.S. ambassador aired them publicly.
