Chaos, provocations and violence: How attacks on Israeli soccer fans unfolded

In Amsterdam, many civic leaders agree on basic facts.

They largely concur that some Israeli fans stoked anger in the city’s Muslim population by chanting incendiary and racist slogans, including declaring that there were “no children” in the Gaza Strip any more, and by defiling the Palestinian flag and vandalising the cab.

They also agree that Israeli fans were assaulted on multiple occasions in different locations, often in hit-and-run attacks on bikes and on foot, and that some attackers appear to have singled out their victims for being Jewish.

This was not the eruption of violence that Europe often sees around big soccer matches, with groups of supporters from rival clubs clashing in the streets, authorities said. The city’s top prosecutor, Rene de Beukelaar, said on Friday that officials were investigating whether the attackers were linked in a formal way, and whether there was an “organised connection” between various acts of violence.

Tensions were already high well before Thursday night’s match in a city with a large Muslim population and a well of anger over Israel’s conduct in the war.

Fearing violence at the game, and furious over the Dutch government’s continuing support of what he calls a genocidal Israeli campaign in Gaza, a prominent Muslim member of the City Council, Sheher Khan, said he had pushed the mayor to bar visiting fans from the match.

Given the political backdrop, Khan said in an interview: “If you invite a club from Israel, it will lead to demonstrations and confrontation, inevitably.”

The mayor declined his request, he said, which her office confirmed. In her news conference after the attacks, the mayor, Femke Halsem, a member of the left-leaning Dutch green party, said she had been told multiple times by the Netherlands’ national co-ordinator for security and counterterrorism that there was no concrete threat to the Israeli fans.

All sides agree there was conflict from almost the moment supporters of the Israeli team began to arrive in Amsterdam last week.

On the day of the match, the mayor ordered that a planned protest be moved away from the Ajax stadium for safety reasons. City officials also deployed 800 police officers to the streets around the time of the match.

The attacks appear to have quickly escalated after the match. At least 12 videos verified by the Times depict groups of men questioning, chasing or beating people who were apparently targeted as Maccabi fans. In one video, a man is seen dragging another man while a third curses at him.

A group of men, several wearing Maccabi fan colours, also chased and beat a man, according to two videos, shot by separate people and verified by the Times.

By Friday morning, police said, five people were hospitalised, and dozens more had been injured, some with broken legs. Police said 63 had been arrested – although all the arrests appear to have been made before the match and not in its chaotic aftermath. Amsterdam officials declared a sort of state of emergency on Saturday which barred public protests and empowered police to search people on the street.

“It feels like an accident in slow motion,” Khan said in an interview with the Times.

Nassredin Taibi, a 22-year-old student in Amsterdam, said in an interview on Sunday that he was appalled authorities had not responded to the actions of the Israeli fans.

“Way ahead of the match on Thursday I received messages through my Twitter account that Maccabi hooligans were misbehaving in Amsterdam’s city centre, chanting and tearing down a Palestinian flag,” Taibi said at a pro-Palestinian protest that was critical of the media’s coverage of the events.

“Nobody said anything about it,” he said. “I and others spent two days contacting local politicians to make this known.”

Interviews with witnesses and local officials, as well as screenshots of text exchanges over social media and online videos verified by the Times, suggest that the attackers specifically targeted Israelis and Jewish people. Some victims reported being stopped and asked if they were Israeli or Jewish. Videos verified by the Times showed others being asked to show their passports or trying to escape harm by saying they were not Jewish.

Khan said some Muslims in the Netherlands had been angered by the Dutch government’s support for the Israeli bombardment and invasion of Gaza that followed the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel from there by Hamas. They have concluded that the Dutch ideal of human rights does not apply to Muslims, and their frustrations, he said, were inflamed by the actions of some Maccabi fans.

“It is not an excuse for violence,” he said, “but it is an explanation for it.”

All sides agree there was conflict from almost the moment supporters of the Israeli team began to arrive in Amsterdam last week.

On Wednesday, some fans pulled a Palestinian flag from its perch on a downtown building and burned it in a city square, police confirmed. A Muslim taxi driver’s car was attacked as he sat inside it, Khan said. A taxi’s dashcam video from Wednesday, verified by the Times, shows a man hitting the car with a long object. The police chief also said a cab had been vandalised that night.

After that attack, police said, a call went out on Wednesday night for taxi drivers to mobilise, and cars began to gather outside the casino.

On Thursday, hours before the match, police officers filled the streets near Johan Cruyff Arena, bringing horses and dogs with them.

Brian Schuurman, who has seen more than 400 home Ajax matches in his years supporting the club, noticed officers when he arrived early to meet some friends. He saw fans of both clubs streaming towards the stadium, but also people who he said were clearly not soccer fans, some of them wearing black with their faces obscured.

One of those people confronted a man who was walking towards the stadium with his young son, Schuurman said, and then punched him. The father, who was wearing a commemorative scarf bearing the names of both teams, fell to the ground. The child, Schuurman said, looked terrified. The attackers fled before the police arrived.

“It was unprecedented for me,” said Schuurman.

Police said on Friday that protesters had broken into small groups near the stadium seeking out Israeli fans, but that officers had been able to avert confrontations before the match.

There were no physical altercations during the match. Several Ajax supporters at the match said the Israeli fans did not stop cheering during a moment of silence in the stadium for flood victims in Spain, which drew rebukes on social media. Several Israeli fans interviewed after the match said they had not heard the call for silence.

The match ended around 11pm, and the exact sequence of events that followed remains unclear.

As people made their way back to the city centre and their hotels, police and other local officials said, many of the Israeli fans came under “hit and run” attacks from masked assailants who often rode powerful electric bicycles with fat tyres – fast and deft vehicles that allowed for quick escapes through the many backstreets and alleys of the city centre.

Police escorted some Israelis away from the stadium. Others lingered or took trains back to the central city. Some described harrowing journeys back to their hotels.

Ofek Ziv, 27, a financial adviser from Petah Tikva, Israel, said he was struck in the head by a stone soon after leaving the central station after the match, while he was putting his Maccabi T-shirt inside his backpack. He and a friend continued walking when they heard a loud blast behind them: a firecracker. Later came a smoke grenade. They saw frightened couples and a scared teenager.

Ziv’s friend, Malhem, is an Arabic speaker. Ziv said Malhem started talking in Arabic to people around them to make the group seem as if they weren’t Israelis. They then started running.

“It was a kind of shock in which you had to rely on your survival instinct,” Ziv said.

Some Maccabi fans appear to have geared up for confrontation.

A video taken after midnight by a teenage Dutch YouTube personality and verified by the Times shows a group of men, many wearing Maccabi fan colours, picking up pipes and boards from a construction site, then chasing and beating a man. The incident was also captured in a video shot by a photographer, Annet de Graaf.

In the YouTube video, the Dutch teenager says that Israeli fans also threw rocks at a house draped with a Palestinian flag, before police loaded them into a bus. Separately, a group of men, some in Maccabi fan gear, charge into the alley, the video shows, where the YouTuber said there was another group of people.

Some Israeli fans said in interviews that they had armed themselves on Thursday as a defensive measure.

Arie Kegen, 49, from Ramat Gan, Israel, was in Amsterdam with a group that included four teenagers and an older man. Kegen described a walk back to his group’s hotel from the train station in which they encountered men with knives and clubs.

When Kegen and his friends saw a broken wooden bed frame on the street, he said, they took it apart to use the wooden panels as clubs in case they needed to fend off attackers. He tossed away his stick when requested to do so by police, he said.

“I told them: ‘Now is our chance to run to the hotel. Grab the sticks, and let’s run to the hotel together,’” Kegen said he told his group.

Friday morning brought calmer streets and consequences.

Israeli officials organised flights to bring hundreds of Maccabi fans home. After arriving home, some Israeli fans and those who greeted them at the airport repeated the incendiary chants against Arabs and Gaza residents, according to a video verified by the Times.

By Saturday, the police said most of those arrested in connection with the incidents had been released, although many were ticketed and are still suspects. Four remained in custody.

On Sunday afternoon, about 150 people gathered to protest in the central city, in violation of the municipal ban. Many carried Palestinian flags. Signs proclaimed: “We want our streets back.” In less than 30 minutes, police arrived to break up the crowd.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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