A man shouted: “Dirty Jew, I will kill you in Allah’s name” at a Jewish mother in front of her children on a beach in France last week, a watchdog against antisemitism told police.
The woman reported the incident in Deauville, Normandy, a popular summertime resort among French Jews and others, to the Jewish Observatory of France (OJF), whose lawyer Julien Bensimhon reported the incident to police in the woman’s name as her legal representative, OJF said in a statement.
“This is not simply a hostile exchange. It exposes a hatred and desire to intimidate, with antisemitic violence, expressed in a public setting in the presence of children. This situation requires a severe and rapid judicial action that would serve as an example,” OJF wrote in a statement.
On Friday, the French Interior Ministry published a report examining anti-religious incidents. Antisemitic incidents accounted for about 53% of all documented cases in 2025 in France, where Jews comprise less than 1% of the population, the document said.
“This is because of an increace of about 203% in antisemitic incidents between 2022 and 2025,” the report said. There were 1,320 documented antisemitic incidents in France in 2025, a 16% decrease from the previous year. Before 2023, the tally had not crossed the 1,000 mark in decades. That year, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel on Oct. 7, murdering some 1,200 people and triggering a response that has escalated into a regional war.
The ministry also documented 843 anti-Christian incidents in 2025, a 9% increase over 2024, driven by a rise in attacks on people (a 70% increase in that category of attacks over 2024). In previous years, a larger share of the anti-Christian attacks was against property, mostly churches. The tally for anti-Muslim incidents was 326 cases, an 88% increase over 2024, the report said.
Separately, the editor-at-large of the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, Monica Osborne, wrote in a blog post in The Times of Israel that she witnessed a woman get physically attacked near an anti-Israel protest in front of her home in Florence, Italy, on May 18.
“A woman standing along the river and looking toward the bridge teeming with protesters shouted toward them with passion: ‘You are the fascists! You are the hypocrites! You know nothing about Gaza,’” Osborne wrote.
A protester “moved toward her aggressively” and “struck her physically with his full body, using his hands and his flag as well. She screamed for the police and they were there in seconds, keeping the man at bay,” Osborne wrote.
She added she had recorded the incident and had offered to share it with authorities.
The Polizia Municiplae, the Municipal Police of Florence, and the Polizia di Stato, State Police, did not reply in time for publication to a query by JNS requesting information on the incident and the handling of the suspect whom Osborne said she saw detained.
