London Stansted Airport officials on Monday said they were investigating reports that a woman who’d identified herself as working there had hurled verbal abuse at passengers arriving from Israel last week.
Witnesses told GB News and other outlets that the woman, who is black and appears to be young, shouted “free Palestine” and unspecified insults at the passengers as they were exiting customs. Staffers asked her to stop, and she replied: “F**k off, bro, I work in this airport” before leaving.
A spokesman for Campaign Against Antisemitism, a Jewish community advocacy group, said in a statement that, “Being at the airport should never mean having to put up with these attention-seeking stunts designed to cause alarm. London Stansted Airport is right to launch an investigation and we will be paying close attention to the outcome.”
According to Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, the United Kingdom recorded the highest per capita rate of violent antisemitic assaults in the Jewish world in 2025, with 121 serious cases among a Jewish population of roughly 300,000.
Incidents included the Oct. 2 jihadist attack on a Manchester synagogue, in which two Jews died. This year, British Jews were horrified by the stabbing of two Jews in Golders Green on April 29 and the torching of four Hatzola Northwest ambulances in London on March 23.
The Community Security Trust, British Jewry’s watchdog on antisemitism, recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, the second-highest total on record.
Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, expressed concern about “the rise in violent antisemitic incidents in the U.K.” during a telephone conversation earlier this year with his British counterpart, Yvette Cooper.
On X, Sa’ar quoted former British Prime Minister Tony Blair who “pointed to the connection between the irresponsible delegitimisation of Israel and the rise of antisemitism in the West,” Sa’ar wrote.
The U.K. under Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the Labour Party has adopted a relatively hostile stance to Israel, imposing a partial arms embargo on it, recognizing a Palestinian state last year and barring some right-wing Israelis from entering the U.K.
