A low-intensity explosion caused minor damage outside a bank in a heavily Jewish part of Amsterdam on Sunday night, Dutch media reported, in what a local politician connected to recent attacks on a Jewish school in the Dutch capital, a synagogue in Rotterdam and another synagogue in Belgium.
The explosion was directed against the Bank of New York in the Zuidas area in southern Amsterdam, the AT5 television channel reported on Monday. A video that circulated on social media showed perpetrators lighting the fuse, Michael Vis, a senior councilor in the City Council of Amsterdam, wrote on X. No one was hurt in the explosion.
The video framed all three incidents in the Netherlands as actions by an Islamist terrorist cell that the video’s makers called Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya, said Viss, who is Jewish.
According to a report published Monday by Israel’s Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Ministry, the Harakt Ashab group first surfaced after the March 9 explosion outside a synagogue in Liege, Belgium. It was linked in online videos to the incidents in Rotterdam and Amsterdam on March 13 and 14, respectively.
The attacks “damaged property and did not cause casualties,” the report said, but their “main objective was psychological warfare, to sow fear in the Jewish communities.” The group allegedly published videos, accompanied by jihadist slogans, of the attacks. The videos “spread quickly on Telegram channels affiliated with Shi’ite militant networks and pro-Iranian circles, including channels linked to Hezollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC),” the report said.
The group’s name means “the movement of the people of the right” and originates in a Quranic term describing the righteous who, on the Day of Judgment, will hold the record of their deeds in their right hands, the report said. In the Sunni interpretation, it refers generally to righteous believers, whereas in the Shi’ite interpretation, it may refer specifically to the followers of Imam Ali.
“The organization’s statements have also included references to historical battles such as Khaibar and Badr, which are often used in militant propaganda to frame modern conflicts within historical narratives from early Islam,” the ministry’s report said.
The group’s name and logos bear a resemblance to Harakat Ansar Allah al-Awfiya’ (HAAA)—an Iran-backed Iraqi Shi’ite militia that the United States designated as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) in 2025 after it killed three U.S. servicemembers in an attack on a U.S. military base in Jordan.
The attacks in Europe appear to be staged by locals rather than foreign operatives, the ministry’s report said, noting that Dutch authorities have arrested four teenagers aged 17-19 from the city of Tilburg after stopping a suspicious vehicle near another synagogue.
This adds a layer of complexity to the task of apprehending the people ordering and planning the attacks, said Vis. “The presumed use of ‘freelancers’ makes the planners difficult to catch. For now, the attacks have targeted buildings. But we must take this very seriously because of the possible next step,” he wrote on X.
