TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Last year saw the highest level of deadly violence against Jews in over three decades, with 20 people killed in antisemitic attacks, according to an annual study released by Tel Aviv University on Monday.
The violence, including a deadly attack at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia, continued a spike that began following Hamas Oct. 7, 2023, attacks and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza, the report’s authors said.
“The data raise
concern that a high level of antisemitic incidents is becoming a normalized reality,” said Uriya Shavit, the chief editor of the widely cited annual report.
Deadly antisemitic attacks were recorded on three continents, according to the report. Fifteen people were killed at the holiday event at Sydney’s Bondi Beach in December. There were additional fatalities in two antisemitic attacks in the U.S. in Washington, D.C., Colorado; and in Britain, where two people were killed at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.
The report also tracked an increase in antisemitic attacks that resulted in physical harm, including beatings and stone throwing.
The study found that 2025 was the deadliest year for antisemitic attacks since 1994, when the bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina killed 85 people and wounded more than 300. An Argentine court has blamed Iran and its Hezbollah proxy for the attack.
According to the report, there was a moderate increase in the overall number antisemitic incidents last year compared with 2024, but that total represents a huge jump from 2022, before the war in Gaza. The report tracks incidents that range from physical attacks and vandalism to verbal threats and harassment on social media.
“The peak in the number of incidents was recorded in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack, after which we began to see a downward trend — but unfortunately, that trend did not continue in 2025,” Shavit said.
In the United Kingdom, there were 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, a small increase from 3,556 in 2024. In Canada, the total number of incidents grew from 6,219 in 2024 to 6,800 in 2025, a number more than three times higher than in 2022.
The report found that even after the Gaza ceasefire took effect last October, antisemitic incidents continued to rise from the same period during the previous year. In Australia, there were 492 antisemitic incidents between October and December 2024, that number increased to 588 during the same time in 2025. Comparatively, there were a total of 472 antisemitic incidents across Australia during all of 2022, before the war between Israel and Hamas began.
Most physical attacks were carried out by people acting on their own, which is why it is so difficult to try to prevent them, according to Carl Yonker, the study’s director of research. He noted that most of the attacks were carried out by either extremist white Christians devoted to white supremacy or radical Muslims, but that often the attackers were unemployed and struggling financially.
Each year, Tel Aviv University’s Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the Irwin Cotler Institute for Democracy, Human Rights and Justice, releases the report about antisemitism ahead of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. The day marks a national memorial for the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, which begins Monday evening.
The statistics are based on reports from police, national authorities and local Jewish communities.
