A statue of Anne Frank, famous for her diary account of hiding from the Nazis during World War II, has been covered with pro-Palestinian Arab graffiti, AFP reported on Sunday.
According to images published on X, the base of the statue was spray-painted with the slogan "Free Gaza", while the girl's hands were painted with the same blood-red color.
Police have opened an investigation into the defacement, which likely occurred in the night from Saturday to Sunday, an Amsterdam police spokesman told AFP, adding that no suspect had yet been identified.
This marks the second time in a month that the statue has been defaced. In July, an antisemitic vandal painted the word “Gaza” on the statue of Frank.
The Amsterdam house where the Frank family took refuge for two years before being captured by the Nazis in 1944 -- after which they were sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp -- has become a museum dedicated to her story.
The vandalism comes as antisemitic incidents have multiplied across the world since Hamas' October 7 attacks on Israel and the war in Gaza which followed.
Last year, police in Poland arrested a man suspected of projecting an antisemitic text onto Frank House.
The incident when the slur “Ann Frank [sic], inventor of the ballpoint pen” was projected for several minutes onto the Anne Frank House. The text is the antisemitic claim that Anne Frank’s diary could not be authentic because it was partly written in ballpoint pen, which was not available during the Holocaust, and was instead later written as a forgery by people other than Anne Frank.
The suspect was later extradited from Poland to the Netherlands.
The Anne Frank House attracts about 1.2 million visitors annually. In 2018, it unveiled a renovation in which an audio tour and several new displays were added to its collection of exhibitions.