Statue of Anne Frank in Amsterdam vandalized with the word 'Gaza'

An antisemitic vandal painted the word “Gaza” on a statue of Anne Frank, located near the famed Holocaust diarist’s first home in Amsterdam, JNS reported on Tuesday, citing a local watchdog.

“More ‘anti-Zionism'. The statue of Anne Frank on the Merwede Square in Amsterdam, where the Jewish diarist lived until she went into hiding in 1942, has been defaced with red paint and the text ‘Gaza,'” wrote the Hague-based Center for Information and Documentation Israel on social media, adding that a police report was filed.

Local bookseller Gert-Jan Jimmink, who initiated the monument of Frank some 20 years ago, told Amsterdam’s local AT5 news station that he previously urged the city to install cameras and street lighting.

The statue of Frank “represents the 14,000 Jews from this neighborhood who were murdered,” he told the news station. “It has nothing to do with current events.”

The incident comes amid a spike in antisemitic vandalism around the world, following Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel and the war in Gaza.

Last month, the anti-Israel Palestine Action Amsterdam group vandalized a university building and several companies, alleged to have ties to the Jewish state, with red paint in protest of the war against Hamas terrorists, according to JNS.

Last year, the Center for Information and Documentation Israel recorded a 245% rise in antisemitic incidents compared to 2023.

While there was a sharp rise in the number of incidents following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks, the total number of incidents before the massacre was already nearing the 2022 total, the CIDI said.

Last year, police in Poland arrested a man suspected of projecting an antisemitic text onto Frank House.

The incident when the slur “Ann Frank [sic], inventor of the ballpoint pen” was projected for several minutes onto the Anne Frank House. The text is the antisemitic claim that Anne Frank’s diary could not be authentic because it was partly written in ballpoint pen, which was not available during the Holocaust, and was instead later written as a forgery by people other than Anne Frank.

The suspect was later extradited from Poland to the Netherlands.

The Anne Frank House attracts about 1.2 million visitors annually. In 2018, it unveiled a renovation in which an audio tour and several new displays were added to its collection of exhibitions.