Court gives prison sentences for Amsterdam ‘pogrom’

Five football fans were found guilty of attacking Israelis following a match in the Netherlands

An Amsterdam court has handed down sentences to five people in connection to last month’s clashes between Dutch and Israeli football fans, which Israeli officials described as a pogrom.

The clashes occurred on November 7 following a match between local team Ajax and Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv. The violence erupted during a spike in anti-Israeli sentiment stemming from the war in Gaza. Some attackers carried Palestinian flags and chanted anti-Semitic slogans.

On Tuesday, the court found five Dutch nationals guilty of violence against Israelis, sentencing four of them to one to six months in prison. The fifth was sentenced to 100 hours of community service.

While the court found video evidence of attacks against Maccabi fans, it also noted that the footage shows Israeli fans pulling down Palestinian flags, shouting anti-Arab slogans, and vandalizing cabs.

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Although there were conflicting reports on what specific incident led to the unrest, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the attacks on Israeli fans a “horrific anti-Semitic incident,” while President Isaac Herzog labeled them “an anti-Semitic pogrom.”

Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema said the unrest was caused by “a toxic cocktail of anti-Semitism, football hooliganism, and anger over the war in Palestine and Israel and other parts of the Middle East.”

Halsema later told the media that she regretted describing the clashes as a pogrom. “I saw how the word pogrom became very political and actually became propaganda,” she said, arguing that the word was being used to discriminate against Muslims living in the Netherlands.