In an act of vandalism apparently carried out by pro-Hamas radicals in the Netherlands, the statue honouring Holocaust victim Anne Frank in Amsterdam was graffitied with the word “Gaza” in red paint on Tuesday afternoon.
The defacing of the statue of Frank — a German-born Jewish girl who documented in her diary her life under Nazi occupation in the Netherlands before being killed in the Holocaust — was first alerted by the Dutch pro-Israel organisation Cidi, De Telegraaf reports.
“More ‘anti-Zionism’,” the group wrote on X, “The statue of Anne Frank on Merwedeplein in Amsterdam, where the Jewish diarist lived until she went into hiding in 1942, has been defaced with red paint and the text ‘Gaza’. A report has been filed with the police.”
Amsterdam Councillor Stijn Nijssen of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) said: “It is truly shameful that someone would think to draw attention to the Palestinian cause by smearing an image of Anne Frank, an international symbol of the Holocaust.”
It comes as the Maagdenhuis building of the University of Amsterdam was similarly vandalised with red paint over the weekend over the school’s ties to Israel. This has also happened to several companies throughout the Dutch capital.
Other Holocaust monuments, such as the Stolpersteine stumbling stones in The Netherlands, have also faced vandalism by pro-Palestinian radicals in the wake of the October 7th terror attacks on Israel.
Meanwhile, the state senate of Berlin in Germany has introduced a ban on the inverted red triangle symbol because of its use by Hamas and other Islamists to mark the targets of their supposed Jewish enemies, The Telegraph reports.
While the red triangle was originally used in Nazi concentration camps to denote communists, it has also been used by Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups, taking the symbol from the Palestinian flag as a means of marking enemy targets.