The Terror Record

Why this Chapter exists

The record, and the rule for reading it.

In the twentieth century, violence against Jews acquired new banners, a political and national one, and much of it was aimed at the new Jewish state. When is violence in a political conflict war, and when is it antisemitism?

Soldiers killed in battle belong to military history, not to this Unit. What belongs here is the documented record of civilians targeted as Jews or as Israelis. Every case below ends in a document: a court ruling, a state commemoration, an institutional archive, a memorial with names on it.

The murders and attacks outside the organized-terror stream, Pittsburgh to Paris to Halle, are kept on the site’s companion register, The Incident Record, each entry ending with its official record.

Before you read

Eight dates for orientation.

Eight dates frame the wars and borders the record below refers to:

• 1948. Israel declares independence, and the armies of five Arab states invade the next day. About 700,000 Palestinians flee or are expelled from their homes, an event Palestinians call the Nakba (“catastrophe”). The war ends in the 1949 armistice lines. Between 1945 and the early 1970s, about 850,000 Jews left or were forced out of Arab countries, as told in The Departure from MENA. (Nakba figure: Ori Yehudai, Origins, Ohio State University.)
• 1956. The Suez war, fought over the canal and the Egyptian border.
• 1967. The Six-Day War. Israel captures the West Bank and Gaza, and its occupation of those territories begins.
• 1973. The Yom Kippur War, launched against Israel on its holiest day.
• 1979. Egypt signs the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state. Jordan follows in 1994.
• 1993. The Oslo accords: mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO (the Palestine Liberation Organization), and the framework under which the Palestinian Authority was created in 1994.
• 2005. Israel withdraws every soldier and settler from Gaza.
• 2007. Hamas, an Islamist movement designated a terrorist organization by the United States in 1997, seizes Gaza from the Palestinian Authority by force. It still ruled Gaza on October 7, 2023.

The full history, with its sources, is the Modern State of Israel Chapter.

1920–1939

Before the state: a new kind of violence.

Jews had lived in Hebron, Safed, Jerusalem, and Jaffa for many centuries among their neighbors, and violence against them in those earlier centuries is on the record. Organized political violence tied to the national conflict began in a specific, modern decade, the 1920s, under British rule. In the same decade, European conspiracy material began circulating in Arabic.

In April 1920, rioters attacked the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City during the Nebi Musa festival, an annual Muslim pilgrimage feast. Five Jews were killed and more than two hundred wounded, and four Arabs were also killed, all by gunfire, by the count of the British military court of inquiry. The Haganah, the Jewish self-defense organization that later became the basis of Israel’s army, was founded in the weeks that followed. That story is told in the Modern State of Israel Chapter. The land was then called Palestine, governed by Britain under a post-World War I mandate. In May 1921, Arab rioters in Jaffa killed 47 Jews, among them the writer Yosef Haim Brenner.

Then, in one week of August 1929, Arab mobs attacked Jews across the country: 133 Jews killed and 339 wounded, by the count of the British commission of inquiry. Officials also recorded 116 Arab deaths. A later British and American inquiry found that many were caused by police and troops putting down the riots. In Hebron, rioters murdered 67 Jews, most of them on August 24. Many of the survivors had been hidden by Arab neighbors. All of the survivors were evacuated. A few dozen families returned in 1931 and were removed again in 1936, ending a Jewish community that had lived in the city for many centuries, twelve years before the State of Israel existed. (Figures: the Palin Commission report, July 1, 1920, para. 66; the Shaw Commission report, Cmd. 3530, 1930; Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Report, 1946, chapter V; “Hebron Massacre,” Terrorism: Essential Primary Sources (Gale); the memorial record is kept by the Jewish community of Hebron. The return of 1931 and the evacuation of 1936: Jewish Virtual Library, “Hebron”.)

The Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939, an armed revolt against British rule and the Zionist movement, killed about 415 Jews. The same count records about 5,000 Arab and about 100 British deaths in the revolt and its suppression. (Ori Yehudai, Origins, Ohio State University, May 2026.)

1949–1956

The border years.

In the years after the 1948 war, infiltrators crossed into Israel from the surrounding territories thousands of times. Most, by the historian Benny Morris’s estimate, came for economic reasons, but some came armed, and in 1955 and 1956 Egypt organized raids by fedayeen. Infiltrators killed hundreds of Israelis, roughly 200 to 250 of them civilians by scholarly counts. In the same years, Israeli forces killed between 2,700 and 5,000 infiltrators, most of them unarmed. The Israeli record documents the attacks incident by incident. (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, incident register; both counts are the historian Benny Morris’s, in Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956, as also reported in Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall.) These attacks came before the 1967 war.

1964–1970

The hijacking era.

The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964. Its amended 1968 charter, preserved by the Avalon Project at Yale Law School, committed the movement to armed struggle. (The Palestinian National Charter, 1968 · Avalon Project (cited only).) By the end of the decade, its factions had turned to hijacking civilian airliners.

In September 1970, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) set out to hijack five airliners in a coordinated operation, and seized four. On the fifth, an El Al flight, security guards and passengers overpowered the hijackers. Three of the planes were forced to land at a desert airstrip in Jordan called Dawson’s Field, where the emptied planes were blown up for the cameras. The hijackers released most of the 310 hostages within days. They set apart the Jewish passengers and the flight crews and held 56 hostages until September 30. A White House situation report of September 13 counted 40 Americans among those still held: 12 dual nationals, 16 to 18 others thought to be Jewish, and 4 U.S. government employees. (Kissinger to Nixon, September 13, 1970, Foreign Relations of the United States; Naval Postgraduate School, Center for Homeland Defense and Security, timeline.)

September 5–6, 1972

Munich.

At the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, terrorists of Black September, a group with secret links to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction of the PLO, broke into the Israeli team’s quarters in the Olympic Village. They murdered two team members there and took nine hostage. When German police tried a rescue at the Fürstenfeldbruck airfield, the gunmen killed all nine hostages. A German policeman was also killed. In all, eleven members of Israel’s Olympic team were murdered. Israel asked that the Games be cancelled. The International Olympic Committee decided to continue, and its president, Avery Brundage, announced, “The games must go on!”

The district of Fürstenfeldbruck, where the rescue attempt failed, keeps a public digital memorial with the record of the attack, hour by hour. (Erinnerungsort Fürstenfeldbruck, a project of the district.) The banner of this page is the memorial in Munich’s Olympic Park, a granite beam carrying the twelve names.

June 27 – July 4, 1976

Entebbe, and the selection.

On June 27, 1976, hijackers of a PFLP faction, joined by two members of a German revolutionary group, seized an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris and flew it to Entebbe, Uganda. There the hijackers released most of the passengers in stages and held the Israelis. Accounts differ on whether Jews of other nationalities were also singled out. The historian Saul David concludes that a few visibly Orthodox Jews were held with the Israelis. The twelve-member Air France crew stayed with the hostages. On July 4, Israeli commandos flew 2,500 miles and rescued 102 of the roughly 106 hostages. Three hostages died in the raid, the unit commander Yoni Netanyahu was killed, and an elderly hostage, Dora Bloch, was murdered in Uganda afterward. (IDF, the operation record; Time, 2018, quoting Saul David; Times of Israel, March 27, 2019.)

The hijackers called their cause anti-Zionist: opposed to the Jewish state. The Entebbe selection is often cited in the debate over where anti-Zionism ends and antisemitism begins.

1970–1978

Inside Israel: the schools and the roads.

In the same years, attacks inside Israel struck civilian targets. On May 22, 1970, gunmen ambushed a school bus near Moshav Avivim: 12 killed, 9 of them children. On May 30, 1972, three gunmen of the Japanese Red Army, recruited by the PFLP, opened fire in the arrivals hall of Lod Airport. They killed 26 people, among them 17 Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, which observes a remembrance day for them by law. On May 15, 1974, attackers seized a school in Ma’alot with over a hundred students inside. As troops stormed the school, the gunmen opened fire on the students. Twenty-five hostages were killed, 22 of them schoolchildren. On March 11, 1978, attackers landing by sea hijacked a bus on the coastal highway: 38 civilians killed, 13 of them children. (Israel MFA, register of major attacks, 1967–1993.)

1980–1986

The diaspora under attack.

In the 1980s the attacks reached the diaspora, the Jewish communities living outside Israel. On October 3, 1980, a bomb outside the Rue Copernic synagogue in Paris killed four people. In 2023, a French court convicted a suspect in absentia (tried in his absence), a verdict that remains contested, and the case file remains part of the record. On October 9, 1982, gunmen attacked the Great Synagogue of Rome as families left Sabbath services, and a two-year-old boy, Stefano Gaj Taché, was killed. The President of Italy has commemorated him by name, at the synagogue, as a son of Italy. (Presidency of the Italian Republic, 40th-anniversary commemoration.) On September 6, 1986, gunmen murdered 22 worshippers during Sabbath services at the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul. The congregation’s own account preserves the record. (Neve Shalom Synagogue, Istanbul.)

On October 8, 1985, aboard the hijacked cruise ship Achille Lauro, gunmen of the Palestine Liberation Front shot Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old retired American in a wheelchair, and threw his body overboard. He was Jewish, and he was the only passenger killed. An Italian court at Genoa convicted the operation’s commander in absentia in 1986. His daughters set up a memorial foundation in his name at the Anti-Defamation League. (ADL, the Klinghoffer Memorial Foundation.)

1992 · 1994 · 2024

Buenos Aires, and a thirty-year verdict.

On March 17, 1992, a bomb destroyed the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 people. On July 18, 1994, a second bomb leveled the AMIA Jewish community center in the same city, killing 85 people and wounding some 300: the deadliest attack on a diaspora Jewish target since the Second World War. Interpol published red notices in 2007 for six suspects: five Iranian officials, who remain wanted, and the Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, who was killed in 2008. (Interpol, and, on the five Iranians still charged and Mughniyeh’s death in 2008, Buenos Aires Times, September 21, 2026.)

The legal record took three decades to reach a ruling, and the case is still open. On April 11, 2024, Argentina’s Federal Chamber of Criminal Cassation, its top criminal appeals court, ruled that both attacks were ordered by Iran and carried out by Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed group backed by Iran. It declared the AMIA bombing a crime against humanity, a category with no statute of limitations. In September 2026 an Argentine federal judge sent eight Iranian and Hezbollah suspects to trial in absentia. The Argentine public prosecution maintains the full case record. (Ministerio Público Fiscal, AMIA case unit, and Buenos Aires Times, September 21, 2026.) The ruling also appears on this site’s Legal Record.

1987–1993 · 2000–2005

The intifadas: what the word refers to.

The word intifada, an Arabic word meaning “shaking off,” appears in chants and slogans today. The word names two distinct periods, and the figures below come from B’Tselem, an Israeli human-rights organization that often criticizes Israeli government policy.

The First Intifada, from December 1987 to September 1993, was a mass uprising of strikes and boycotts, and of street attacks with stones and firebombs. By B’Tselem’s tables, from December 9, 1987 to September 13, 1993, when Israel and the PLO signed the first Oslo accord, Palestinians killed 160 Israelis, 100 of them civilians. In the same years, Israeli security forces killed 1,087 Palestinians, and Israeli civilians killed 75. The same organization documented a second toll: between roughly 770 and 940 Palestinians were killed in those years by other Palestinians as suspected “collaborators,” and Israeli defense data indicated most had no actual connection to Israel. (B’Tselem, fatality tables; B’Tselem, January 1994 report.)

The Second Intifada, from September 2000 to 2005, was a different event: a campaign of roughly 140 suicide bombings aimed at buses, restaurants, and celebrations. By B’Tselem’s count, from September 29, 2000 through 2005, Palestinians killed 996 Israelis, 683 of them civilians. Israeli forces killed 3,352 Palestinians, and Israeli civilians killed 41. At least 1,572 of the Palestinians killed by Israeli forces were not taking part in the hostilities, by B’Tselem’s classification. Three dates carry the record. June 1, 2001: a suicide bomber outside the Dolphinarium discotheque in Tel Aviv killed 21 people, most of them teenagers. August 9, 2001: a bomber in the Sbarro pizzeria in central Jerusalem killed 16 people, 7 of them children. The sixteenth victim died in 2023 after twenty-two years in a coma. March 27, 2002: a bomber walked into a Passover seder at the Park Hotel in Netanya and killed 30 people, most of them elderly. (B’Tselem, fatalities database, September 29, 2000 to December 31, 2005; Israel MFA, the named victims.)

2012–2015

The diaspora attacks resume under a new banner.

A generation after Rome and Istanbul, the attacks on Europe’s Jews returned, now under the banners of jihadist (violent Islamist) movements rather than Palestinian national ones. On March 19, 2012, a gunman entered the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse and murdered a rabbi, his two small sons, and an eight-year-old girl. France’s national memorial museum of terrorism keeps their names. (Musée-Mémorial du terrorisme.) On May 24, 2014, a gunman returned from fighting in Syria’s civil war murdered four people at the Jewish Museum of Brussels, and a Belgian court sentenced him to life in 2019. On January 9, 2015, a gunman seized the Hypercacher market in Paris, a kosher grocery selling food prepared under Jewish dietary law, and murdered four Jewish men doing their Sabbath shopping. In 2020 a Paris court convicted all fourteen defendants charged with supplying the attackers. A month later, a gunman in Copenhagen killed Dan Uzan, a Jewish volunteer guarding a synagogue during a bat mitzvah celebration (a girl’s coming of age).

1988 to the present

Hamas: the people it rules, and its charter.

Human Rights Watch, in a 2018 report, documented systematic arbitrary arrest and torture of Palestinian critics by Hamas in Gaza. (HRW, “Two Authorities, One Way, Zero Dissent,” October 2018.) Amnesty International documented Hamas’s abductions, torture, and summary executions of Palestinians during the 2014 Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. (Amnesty International, May 2015.) In March 2019, when Gazans marched under the slogan “We Want to Live” against the cost of living, Hamas beat and jailed hundreds, including journalists and human-rights workers. (HRW, March 2019.)

Hamas has stated its reasons in its own documents. Its 1988 charter calls the land of Palestine “an Islamic Waqf,” a religious trust, “consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day,” and says no part of it may be given up (Article 11). It rejects negotiation: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors” (Article 13). It also explains modern history through the Jews: “They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution… They were behind World War I… They were behind World War II” (Article 22). In 2017, a new Hamas document said its conflict is “with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion.” Hamas has not annulled the 1988 charter. The Eastward Turn Chapter sets the two documents side by side. (Hamas, Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, August 18, 1988, preserved in English translation by the Avalon Project, Yale Law School, cited only; Hamas, A Document of General Principles and Policies, Doha, May 1, 2017, cited only; Reuters, May 10, 2017. Israel’s founding Declaration of 1948 is quoted in The Modern State of Israel.)

2023

October 7, 2023.

Content note: this section describes violence against civilians, including sexual violence.

On the morning of October 7, 2023, the holiday of Simchat Torah, when the yearly Torah reading begins again, thousands of attackers led by Hamas broke through the Gaza border fence into southern Israel. They attacked more than twenty communities, army posts, and an outdoor music festival.

Hamas planned and led the attack through its Qassam Brigades. Palestinian Islamic Jihad and at least three other armed groups took part. The Israeli army’s investigation, summarized in February 2025, found that more than 5,000 people entered Israel from Gaza in three waves. The first brought more than 1,000 Nukhba commandos, Hamas’s elite force, and the second 2,000 fighters. The third brought hundreds more fighters and several thousand Gazan civilians. The UN Commission of Inquiry found that armed and unarmed civilians kept entering through the breaches throughout the morning. Some looted homes, and some took part in killings and in taking hostages. Nili Margalit, a nurse from Nir Oz, said she was seized by armed civilians who then sold her to Hamas. “When they were paid, I was taken straight into a tunnel,” she said. At Nir Oz, the Commission found, Palestinian civilians “also participated in the killings.” Defense Minister Israel Katz put the number who crossed at 6,000 in October 2026. (AFP, February 28, 2025; Human Rights Watch, July 17, 2024; UN Commission of Inquiry, A/HRC/56/26, paras. 14, 90–91, and A/HRC/56/CRP.3, paras. 23, 253; Times of Israel, April 9, 2024 and October 5, 2026.)

About 1,200 people were killed, most of them civilians, and 251 were taken hostage into Gaza. At the Nova music festival near Re’im, 364 people were killed. In Kibbutz Be’eri, a community of about 1,100 people, more than 130 were killed and 32 taken hostage. October 7 was the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. (USHMM, October 6, 2024.)

Hamas stated the purpose of the attack itself. On October 24, 2023, seventeen days later, Ghazi Hamad, a member of its political bureau, the movement’s top leadership, said on Lebanon’s LBC television: “We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again. The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.” Al-Aqsa Flood is Hamas’s name for the attack. Later in the interview he demanded an end to the occupation of “all the Palestinian lands.” Asked whether that meant the annihilation of Israel, he answered: “Yes, of course.” (MEMRI, Special Dispatch No. 10923, November 1, 2023, with the clip and transcript.)

The attackers recorded much of what they did themselves. They wore body cameras, filmed on their phones, and posted their acts, at times live, through their victims’ own phones and social media accounts. In Kibbutz Nir Oz, relatives of Bracha Levinson, 74, saw a video of her, wounded in her home, posted to her own Facebook page. In Nahal Oz, attackers used a 17-year-old boy to persuade his neighbors to open their doors and livestreamed his ordeal. He was killed, and his stepsisters, 8 and 15, were taken to Gaza. From Kibbutz Mefalsim, one attacker called his parents on the phone of a woman he had murdered. In the recording, released by the Israeli military and played at the UN Security Council, he says: “Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” The Israeli military compiled 43 minutes of this footage, from body cameras, dashboard cameras, security cameras, and victims’ phones, and screened it for journalists and diplomats. The UN Commission of Inquiry built many of its findings on verified video of the same kind. (UN Commission of Inquiry, A/HRC/56/CRP.3, para. 49, and A/HRC/56/26, para. 32; Times of Israel, October 25, 2023; The Forward.)

Witness and survivor accounts describe sexual violence during the attack and against hostages in captivity. Two United Nations bodies examined them, setting aside some early reports they could not verify. In March 2024, a UN mission led by Pramila Patten, the Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, reported its findings. It found “reasonable grounds to believe” that rape, including gang rape, occurred in at least three locations: the Nova festival site, Road 232, and Kibbutz Re’im. It also found “clear and convincing information” that sexual violence, “including rape, sexualized torture,” was committed against some hostages in captivity. In June 2024, the UN Commission of Inquiry concluded “on reasonable grounds” that members of Hamas’s military wing and other armed groups “committed sexual and gender-based violence against civilians.” Former hostages have since spoken for themselves. Amit Soussana, released in November 2023, was the first to describe being sexually assaulted by a guard. Other women, and men, followed. (UN SRSG-SVC mission report, March 4, 2024, paras. 12, 58–61, 65, 71; UN Commission of Inquiry, A/HRC/56/26, June 14, 2024, paras. 26, 90.)

The 251 hostages included 32 children and teenagers, the youngest nine months old, and men and women in their eighties. Farm workers from Thailand and students from Nepal and Tanzania were taken too. They were held in tunnels and in civilian homes, many of them moved again and again. Keith Siegel told a UN committee he was starved and moved 55 times. Amit Soussana was kept chained by her ankle. “We had to beg for food, beg to use the bathroom. Begging was our existence,” Eli Sharabi told the UN Security Council after 491 days in captivity. In May 2024, the families of five young women soldiers seized from the Nahal Oz base chose to release their captors’ body-camera footage of the abduction, edited to remove the most graphic moments. They did it to press for their daughters’ release: Liri Albag, Karina Ariev, Agam Berger, Daniela Gilboa, and Naama Levy. All five came home in January 2025. (Government of Israel, report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, August 21, 2024; UN News, March 20, 2025; Ynet, November 12, 2025; Times of Israel, May 22, 2024.)

Former hostages have described the civilian homes where they were held. Ada Sagi, 75, was seized from Kibbutz Nir Oz by Islamic Jihad, an armed group allied with Hamas. She told the BBC she was first taken to a family home where children lived. Next she was moved to an apartment in Khan Younis that, she said, had been set up for hostages and was kept by its owner and two guards. (BBC Radio 4, June 19, 2024, as reported by CBS News.) On June 8, 2024, Israeli forces rescued four hostages from two apartment buildings in Nuseirat, a refugee camp in central Gaza. All four, Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv, had been seized at the Nova festival. Kozlov told CNN the three men were held for about six months in a family’s home. Neighbors told CNN the family’s links to Hamas were no secret. CNN reported that Argamani was held in an apartment about 200 meters away. Kozlov told CNN they had been moved between houses several times. (CNN, July 11 and July 19, 2024.) Palestinians were also killed during the raid, among them children, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, which does not separate civilians from fighters in its counts. (PBS NewsHour / Associated Press, June 9, 2024.)

A November 2023 truce freed 105 hostages, and rescue operations freed eight more. Others came home in exchanges and releases during 2025, and the last 20 living hostages were released on October 13, 2025. According to the Israeli military, 38 hostages taken alive were killed in captivity. In August 2024, six were shot in a tunnel in Rafah, among them Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a short time before troops reached them. Shiri Bibas and her sons, Ariel and Kfir, four years and nine months old when they were seized, were killed by their captors in November 2023, Israeli officials concluded from forensic evidence. Three hostages who were trying to escape were shot in error by Israeli soldiers in December 2023. The remains of the last hostage, Ran Gvili, a police officer killed defending Kibbutz Alumim on October 7, were returned on January 26, 2026. (Times of Israel, January 29, 2026; September 1, 2024; February 22, 2025; January 26, 2026.)

The record of that day is preserved in documents and testimony. The USC Shoah Foundation, which has recorded the testimony of Holocaust survivors since 1994, opened an October 7 testimony collection built on the same methodology. Exhibitions and films carry the record to the public. The Nova Music Festival Exhibition, assembled from the festival grounds themselves, has been shown in cities around the world. The documentary We Will Dance Again (2024) is built from survivors’ testimony and the day’s footage, and After October 7: A Personal Journey to Kfar Aza (2024) follows one kibbutz’s survivors afterward (see the Films page).

On the night of the attack, Israel’s security cabinet announced what it called “a series of operational decisions aimed at bringing about the destruction of the military and governmental capabilities of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.” (Prime Minister’s Office statement, October 8, 2023, as reported by the Times of Israel.)

Its aftermath, including the worldwide rise in antisemitic incidents, is documented in the Contemporary Antisemitism Chapter, which carries the story from this day forward.

2023 to the present

The record since October 7.

The years after October 7 added entries in five countries: attacks on Jews and Israelis far from any battlefield.

Makhachkala, Russia · October 29, 2023. In the capital of Dagestan, a Muslim-majority region in southern Russia, a crowd of about 1,500 stormed the airport when a flight from Tel Aviv landed. Rioters searched the terminal, stopped cars, and checked passports, looking for Jewish passengers. No one was killed. Russian courts later sentenced more than 130 participants to prison terms of up to fifteen years. (RFE/RL, and Caucasian Knot, January 16, 2026.)

Amsterdam, the Netherlands · November 7, 2024. After a soccer match between Ajax and the Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv, attackers hunted and beat Israeli fans across the city center. Five of them went to the hospital. Dutch courts found that the attackers had coordinated in chat groups to track the Israelis through the city, and at least nine men were convicted. The night before, some Maccabi fans had torn Palestinian flags from buildings and chanted anti-Arab slogans. The mayor of Amsterdam, the Dutch prime minister, and the Dutch king condemned the violence as antisemitic. (PBS / Associated Press, and, on four more convictions in March 2025, NL Times, March 19, 2025.)

Melbourne, Australia · December 2024. Before dawn, masked men poured fuel inside the Adass Israel Synagogue, home to a strictly Orthodox (Haredi) congregation, and set it alight. Worshippers preparing for morning prayers escaped, and one man suffered burns to his hand. Police declared it a terrorist act. In August 2025 Australia’s government, citing its intelligence agency, said Iran’s Revolutionary Guard had directed the attack, and expelled Iran’s ambassador. By June 2026, police had charged three men with setting the fire, and a fourth with stealing a car allegedly used to drive to the synagogue. (Australian Federal Police, and, on the government’s finding, Global News, August 26, 2025.)

Washington, D.C. · May 21, 2025. Two young Israeli Embassy staffers, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, were shot and killed as they left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. They were a couple, and he had bought a ring. The man charged with their murders shouted “Free, free Palestine” as he was led away. In May 2026, federal prosecutors gave notice that they would seek the death penalty. (JTA; on the death-penalty notice, Associated Press, May 15, 2026.)

Boulder, Colorado · June 1, 2025. A man threw firebombs into a weekly walk held for the Israeli hostages, called Run for Their Lives, on the town’s pedestrian mall. Twenty-nine people were counted as victims, thirteen of them burned or otherwise injured, and Karen Diamond, 82, died of her injuries weeks later. Investigators found the attacker had searched for “Zionist” groups to target. He pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to life in prison. (Colorado Public Radio.)

Manchester, United Kingdom · October 2, 2025. On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, a man drove a car at people outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue, then attacked with a knife. Security staff, worshippers, and police kept him from getting inside. Two congregants, Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, were killed. The attacker stabbed Melvin Cravitz. Adrian Daulby was holding the synagogue doors shut when a police bullet fired at the attacker went through the doors and struck him. Those were the provisional findings when the inquests opened that October. During the attack the man called 999, Britain’s emergency number, to claim responsibility, and pledged allegiance to Islamic State. He died at the scene. By the Community Security Trust’s record, it was the first fatal antisemitic terrorist attack in the UK since the Trust began recording in 1984. The public inquiry into the two deaths is followed on the site’s Incident Record. (Counter Terrorism Policing; Greater Manchester Police, October 3, 2025; Independent Office for Police Conduct, October 8, 2025; inquest opening, Jewish News, October 29, 2025; CST, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025.)

Sydney, Australia · December 14, 2025. On the first night of Hanukkah, two gunmen opened fire on “Chanukah by the Sea,” a community celebration of about a thousand people at Bondi Beach. Fifteen people were killed, among them a ten-year-old girl, and more than forty were wounded. A bystander wrestled a rifle from one of the gunmen. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in Australia’s history. One gunman was shot dead by police. The other, his son, was charged with offences that include 15 counts of murder and a terrorism offence. Five days later, thousands stood shoulder to shoulder at sunrise on Bondi Beach in solidarity with the Jewish community, the scene on the banner of the Contemporary Antisemitism Chapter. On January 8, 2026, Australia’s government announced a Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion in response to what it called “the antisemitic Bondi terrorist attack.” (NBC News, and, on the charges, NPR, December 17, 2025; on the royal commission, Prime Minister of Australia, January 8, 2026.)

West Bloomfield, Michigan, United States · March 12, 2026. A man drove a truck loaded with fireworks into Temple Israel, a Reform synagogue in suburban Detroit. A security guard was injured, and the attacker, trapped in the burning truck, shot himself. No one else was killed. The FBI’s special agent in charge in Detroit assessed it as “a Hezbollah-inspired act of terrorism purposely targeting the Jewish community.” The FBI’s findings are followed on the site’s Incident Record. (JTA, March 31, 2026; FBI Detroit.)

Object Spotlight

Buenos Aires marches with the names.

The object in this Spotlight is a repeated act rather than a monument: every July 18 since 1994, Buenos Aires gathers at the site of the AMIA bombing with the photographs and names of the 85. The commemoration has returned every year while the investigation it demanded stayed open, and in 2024, thirty years on, Argentina’s courts ruled on who ordered the attack.

The analytical question

Where war ends and antisemitism begins.

Political violence in a national conflict is a subject with a military history. The marker that moves an event into this Unit is selection: the documented moment when civilians are chosen as targets for being Jews or Israelis.

Not every act of violence in the conflict belongs in this record, but where selection is documented, the event joins a very old pattern this Unit has traced under many banners.

Resistance or terror? What the law says. Groups that attack civilians often call themselves resistance movements or freedom fighters, and some of their supporters use the same words. The legal texts judge an attack by its target, not by its cause. Article 3, common to all four Geneva Conventions of 1949, forbids “the taking of hostages” “at any time and in any place whatsoever.” Additional Protocol I of 1977 rules that civilians “shall not be the object of attack” and that “acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.” In 2004 the UN Security Council stated that criminal acts against civilians meant to spread terror “are under no circumstances justifiable by considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or other similar nature.” Governments apply these standards when they designate terrorist organizations. The United States designated Hamas in 1997. Britain banned the military wing of Hamas in 2001 and the whole organization in 2021. (Geneva Convention IV, Article 3; Additional Protocol I, Article 51, both from the International Committee of the Red Cross; UN Security Council Resolution 1566, October 8, 2004; US Department of State, Foreign Terrorist Organizations; UK Home Office, Proscribed terrorist groups.)

Violence by Jewish extremists is part of the record too. In 1994, Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli settler, murdered 29 Palestinians at prayer in the Ibrahimi Mosque, at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Israel’s government condemned the attack and outlawed his movement, Kach, as a terrorist organization under Israeli law. In 1999 the state demolished the shrine that admirers had built at his grave. In 1995 a Jewish extremist assassinated Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, for signing the Oslo accords, and the assassin is serving a life sentence.

The response to attackers is also a matter of record. Two attacks that killed Americans in Israel, the murders of David Boim in 1996 and of Taylor Force in 2016, led to an American court judgment against fundraisers for Hamas and to the Taylor Force Act of 2018. That Act cuts most American aid to the Palestinian Authority for as long as it pays stipends to imprisoned attackers and their families.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• Modern Middle East: the documented record of political violence against civilians from 1920 to the present, held separate from the military history of the conflict.
• Historical Thinking & Source Analysis: casualty figures read critically, from B’Tselem’s two-sided tables and Israel’s named-victim lists.
• Civics & the Rule of Law: how courts, Interpol, and prosecutors turn violence into a legal record, from the Genoa conviction of 1986 to the Argentine ruling of 2024.
• Holocaust & Genocide Studies: the Entebbe selection as a modern case studied in the scholarship on post-Holocaust antisemitism.
• Media & Information Literacy: the word intifada as a case study in checking a slogan against the record it invokes.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Global History & Geography: 10.7 (the modern Middle East: the conflict-era record) and 10.10 (human rights: civilians targeted as a group, and the international legal response).
• Common Core ELA-Literacy: RH.9–10.2 (central ideas from primary and secondary sources) and RH.11–12.7 (integrating court records, statistics, and institutional accounts).

Further Teaching Resources

• Erinnerungsort Fürstenfeldbruck, the digital memorial to the Munich 1972 attack kept by the district of Fürstenfeldbruck, where the rescue attempt failed.
• Argentina’s AMIA prosecution unit, the full case record of the 1994 bombing.
• B’Tselem statistics, the two-sided casualty record.
• Films & Video: We Will Dance Again and related documentary material in the full Films & Video collection.