PARIS (Reuters) – French police have arrested more than 20 people over dozens of antisemitic acts carried out since Saturday, including harassment of Jewish children by fellow pupils at school, the government said on Wednesday.
France is home to some of Europe’s largest Muslim and Jewish populations and conflicts in the Middle East can lead to tensions there – which Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said the government aimed to avert with heightened police protection of Jewish sites, including schools and synagogues.
“It’s important that all French people of Jewish faith know they are protected,” Darmanin said as he and Education Minister Gabriel Attal visited a Jewish school near Paris.
Some 10,000 police are protecting 500 sites, Darmanin said.
Attal said pupils of Jewish faith had faced problems in their schools, including a pupil in the wider Paris region who had been attacked by fellow pupils who ripped his t-shirt. Any such incidents would be referred to judicial authorities, he said.
In Britain, reports of antisemitic incidents have tripled since the weekend compared with the same period last year, a Jewish charity said on Tuesday.
(Reporting by Zhifan Liu; Writing by Ingrid Melander; editing by John Stonestreet)
