Fresh off a flight home, Israeli football fans back from Amsterdam recalled on Friday clashes and violence they said targeted Jewish people following a Europa League match.
Kobi Eliyahu, 40, said people with their faces covered “waited (on) every single corner… it was very frightening to see that”.
Another returning fan, Eliya Cohen, said that after the match between Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv and Dutch team Ajax on Thursday, he saw “Muslims looking for Jews to beat them up” in central Amsterdam.
“So I left. On the one hand, I wanted to help people out, but on the other hand I didn’t want to stay there,” Cohen told reporters at Ben Gurion airport near Israel’s commercial hub of Tel Aviv.
At the arrivals hall, returning fans — some wearing Maccabi Tel Aviv scarves and jerseys — were greeted by a swarm of reporters and embraced by relieved relatives.
The unrest following the match, which the home club won 5-0, left five people hospitalised and was deemed “anti-Semitic” by Dutch and Israeli officials.
Despite a huge police presence, authorities were unable to stop the rapid attacks on fans in several parts of the city.
Nadav Zer, 33, said he and others he was with had to run back to their hotel to escape the violence.
“We heard blasts the whole night” as well as “shouts and screams” in Arabic, said Zer.
“It was unimaginable, the whole night,” he added.
“But we never heard the police.”
Eliyahu, a photographer who attended the game with his siblings, said: “It was orchestrated. They knew what was going to happen and it was a total surprise for us.”
To him, the violence “looked like 1930s in Europe”, when anti-Semitic attacks multiplied with the rise of Nazism in Germany, leading up to World War II.
“Everybody should understand what happened last night,” said Eliyahu, who called on others to avoid Europe from now on.
“Israeli and Jewish people should never go to Europe again. They don’t deserve us,” he said.
‘Not connected to football’
The violence in Amsterdam took place with anti-Israeli sentiment and reported anti-Semitic acts across the world soaring more than a year into the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, which has spilled over to Lebanon, too.
Tensions were already running high before the match, with Dutch police reporting “incidents on both sides” on Wednesday.
An unverified video on social media purportedly filmed on Thursday appeared to show some Maccabi fans chanting in Hebrew: “Let the IDF (Israeli military) win! We’ll fuck the Arabs!”
Many of the Maccabi Tel Aviv players who landed at the airport left without offering any comments, but the club’s CEO Ben Mansford spoke to journalists, calling the events “tragic”.
“Lots of people went to a football game to support Maccabi Tel Aviv, to support Israel, to support the Star of David,” he said.
“And for them to be running into rivers, to be kicked while defenceless on the floor… that’s very very sad times for us all.”
Mansford said that the violence “was not connected to football”.
“There was a superb atmosphere in the stadium… but clearly once our fans started leaving the stadium, turning up in train stations, turning up back in central Amsterdam, that’s when they were obviously targeted,” he said.
Zer, the returning fan, said that despite tight security before the match, the Israelis were left to fend for themselves as it ended and night fell.
“There were… people with bats and stones looking for Israelis,” he recalled, saying he remembered them speaking Arabic.
Attackers, mostly young men, “came from everywhere and we tried to escape from them”, he said.