MORE than 1,500 anti-Semitic acts and comments have been recorded in France since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said today. 

There have been growing tensions in France, home to large Jewish and Muslim communities, as war rages in the Gaza Strip.

“There have been 1,518 anti-Semitic acts or remarks”, Darmanin told broadcaster Europe 1 in an interview. 

This was a more than three-fold increase compared to the whole of 2022, when 436 anti-Semitic acts or remarks were recorded.

“These are mainly tags and insults, but there are also assaults and injuries,” Darmanin added.

Those acts resulted in 571 arrests, the ministry told AFP.

In late October, Paris prosecutors opened an investigation into an incident when dozens of Stars of David were daubed on buildings around the city and its suburbs. 

France has accused Russia of interfering in its affairs by sharing photos online of the anti-Semitic graffiti.

Darmanin said there had also been anti-Muslim incidents “but they are not on the scale of what we are seeing in terms of anti-Semitism”. 

He said that some mosques had received threats of violence.

A total of 330 investigations have been opened into anti-Semitic acts and justifications of terrorism since October 7, the justice ministry told AFP yesterday.

On Sunday, more than 180,000 people turned out to march against anti-Semitism in France.

The march took place a day after several thousand people demonstrated in Paris under the rallying cry “Stop the massacre in Gaza”.

On October 7, Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an attack into Israel, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking around 240 others hostage, according to Israeli officials

Israel has retaliated with a relentless bombardment of the Gaza Strip and a ground invasion, killing more than 11,100 people, many of them children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. – AFP, November 14, 2023.