A report from the London Metropolitan Police examining rising levels of anti-Semitism in the British city found that there were 87 incidents in May, the highest number in three years.
The figures show that violence against the Jewish community in London surged to a “worrying” level in May in the wake of the fighting between Israel and Hamas, reported Sky News.
Data released by the Metropolitan Police recorded 87 anti-Jewish incidents in May, four times higher than any month since 2018.
Every month between 2018 and April 2021 had no more than 22 and no fewer than seven incidents.
According to the police report, 39 incidents involved male victims and 43 involved female victims.
In one attack, police arrested a man outside of a kosher supermarket in the heavily Jewish Golders Green neighborhood on May 21, after he harassed Jewish shoppers and attacked a driver whose car had an Israeli flag.
Several days earlier, two men attacked a rabbi near his synagogue, with the suspects hurling anti-Semitic insults and stealing the man’s phone. The rabbi suffered moderate injuries and was hospitalized.
The week before, anti-Israel protestors drove through a Jewish area of north London broadcasting rape threats against Jewish women and other anti-Semitic messages from a megaphone.
The Jewish community in the borough of Hackney were also targeted, with over 30 Jewish-owned vehicles having their tires slashed.
"Usually when it flares up in Israel, it flares up here locally," Chaim Hochhauser, from the London Shomrim neighbourhood watch, told Sky News.
His group works to protect the Jewish community of Stamford Hill in north London.
"There needs to be better security provided by the police, particularly for women in the neighbourhood,”
Stamford Hill Rabbi Herschel Gluck told Sky News.
In a statement, the Metropolitan Police said that they are aware that the sharp increase in incidents has left the Jewish community worried.
"Behaviour of this kind and abuse against any individual or group has no place in our city,” they wrote. "We will not tolerate it and will act quickly and robustly in response to all reported crimes of this nature."