Paris:
France has recorded more than a thousand anti-Semitic acts since the deadly October 7 attack by Hamas gunman on Israel, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said Sunday. “The number of anti-Semitic acts has exploded,” he told France 2 television, adding that 486 people have been arrested for such offences, including 102 of foreigners.
Paris police chief Laurent Nunez said Sunday that there had been 257 anti-Semitic in the Paris region alone, and 90 arrests.
There was no typical profile for those arrested, he added. They ranged from “young kids who say very serious things” to people involved in the pro-Palestinian cause who had gone too far.
Paris prosecutors are already investigating the daubing of dozens of Stars of David on buildings around the city and its suburbs last week, seen as threatening Jews.
And in the city of Lyon, prosecutors said this weekend they suspected that anti-Semitism may have been behind an attack on a young Jewish woman, who was stabbed in her home there.
Police are treating the attack as attempted murder, they said, adding that the woman’s life was not in danger and no arrest had been made.
France’s Jewish population, estimated at over 500,000, is the largest in Europe and the third-biggest in the world, after Israel and the United States.
Hamas militants on October 7 and killed 1,400 people in Israel, mostly civilians, Israeli authorities say.
Since then, Israel has relentlessly pounded the besieged Gaza Strip in its battle to destroy Hamas, levelling entire city blocks and killing more than 9,700 people, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
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