City officials and police “took seriously” the risks around Israeli soccer fans’ arrival, but failed to account for relevant “scenarios,” the document asserted.

By Canaan Lidor

Authorities in Amsterdam did not prepare adequately for the violence that dozens of Arab men perpetrated in the city last year against Israeli soccer fans, the oversight unit of the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security wrote in a report published Monday.

The Justice and Security Inspectorate reached this conclusion after its months-long investigation into the attacks, which took place on Nov. 7-8, 2024, in the Dutch capital, and which many Dutch Jews and others have called a modern-day pogrom.

City officials and police “took seriously” the risks around the match, the report said, but “The rapid proliferation of calls to violence on social media, the movement of inciters who were hard to follow, and the sudden escalation of violence led to situations that were not taken into account in scenarios” that authorities had prepared for, it added.

The authors asserted that the challenges facing the police in guaranteeing the safety of hundreds of Israeli soccer fans were considerable, an assessment expressed also in the titled of the 57-page document: “Between the Seen and the Unforeseen: Police in a Complex Reality.”

The report also asserted that the removal of a Palestinian flag from a balcony in Amsterdam by a group of Maccabi fans was “a trigger” for the online agitation.

“Relatively small incidents, like the removal of the Palestinian flag by Maccabi fans, were shared within minutes, commented on and made to appear bigger than they were,” the report also states.

Addressing the conduct of Maccabi fans, it said some of them provoked scooter drivers and taxi drivers, stole the flag and waved their belts at individuals who cursed them. On Sunday, the NOS broadcaster reported that prosecutors dropped probes against two Maccabi fans because the alleged evidence in their cases had been deleted from the cameras of the GVB public transportation company.

None of the Israeli fans have been prosecuted. The police had identified 122 suspects in the disturbances surrounding the Ajax–Maccabi match. Of those, 36 have been named and 10 have been prosecuted and nine were sentenced, police said in March.

The sentences ranged from 12 weeks in jail for assault to community service and release with time served during preparation for trial. Critics from the Dutch Jewish community said the sentences were inappropriately mild.

The trials exposed the antisemitic agitation of the perpetrators, and also how organizers worked for days to bus in culprits from across the Netherlands to ambush Israelis, whom the attackers often referred to simply as “Jews.”

The information from the trials conformed with reports by Israeli authorities, including the National Center for Combating Antisemitism under Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Minister Amichai Chikli, which found ties between the attacks and Hamas.

Some of the information in the indictments came from transcripts lifted from correspondence within WhatsApp groups that police had infiltrated and monitored, yet failed to use the information to prevent the assaults.

Hundreds of Arab men, including many taxi drivers, coordinated their attacks on Jews in Amsterdam both in advance of the match and in real-time.

Some victims of the Nov. 7 assaults were made to beg for mercy on their knees and say “Free Palestine.” Others, including at least one woman, were set upon by men without any verbal exchange. At least one man jumped into a canal to escape his attackers; another was hit by a vehicle. According to reports, attackers asked to check the passports of people they confronted on the street.

The pogroms, the most violent and largest-scale series of violent attacks on Jews in the Netherlands since the 1940s, shocked local Jews also for how prominent politicians, including Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema, later blamed the persecution partially on the Maccabi fans.