Four guilty pleas in the arson attack on Jewish ambulances in London and the close of Australia’s public inquiry hearings gave the week a clear evidentiary record. New data from Germany, alongside the latest American, British, French, European, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand figures, show why a lower annual total cannot by itself establish that antisemitism is receding.

Paris, August 30, 2026

Abstract: This week brought court admissions in Britain, the end of public hearings at Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, and a new record in the German state of Thuringia. The wider evidence remains consistent: recorded antisemitic incidents and violence are still far above their pre–October 7, 2023 baselines in several major Jewish diaspora countries. Where headline totals fell in 2025, category changes, record or rising assaults, underreporting, and incompatible national methods prevent those movements from being read as proof of a broad decline in antisemitism.

At London’s Old Bailey on Friday, August 28, four young men admitted their roles in setting fire to four ambulances used by Hatzola, the volunteer emergency service based in the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Golders Green. The vehicles were not empty shells. They were fully equipped ambulances, and exploding gas canisters spread damage to nearby apartments and a synagogue.

The pleas converted one of the year’s most alarming reported attacks on British Jewish communal infrastructure into an established criminal fact. They did not, however, settle every question surrounding the case. That distinction—between what has been proved, what prosecutors have alleged, and what investigators are still examining—runs through this week’s record.

London: what the guilty pleas establish

Hamza Iqbal, 20; Rehan Khan, 19; Saif Ali, 18; and Judex Atshatshi, 18, pleaded guilty to destroying or damaging property while reckless as to whether life would be endangered. The Metropolitan Police said the March 23 attack targeted ambulances operated by the Jewish community. All four defendants were remanded in custody and are expected to be sentenced in spring 2027. A fifth defendant, Subhan Ahmed, 18, pleaded not guilty to assisting an offender; his trial is anticipated in January 2027.[1]

The legal boundary matters. The guilty pleas establish participation in the arson. At the August 28 hearing, a prosecutor suggested that the offense had a possible terrorist connection, and counterterrorism police have examined whether Iranian proxies were involved in this and other attacks on Jewish sites. The court proceeding did not establish such a link. Iran’s embassy has denied involvement in violent activity in Britain.[2] It would therefore be inaccurate either to omit the counterterrorism inquiry or to present its central hypothesis as a judicial finding.

The Hatzola case sits within a measurable change in Britain. The Community Security Trust, or CST, recorded 1,926 antisemitic incidents in the first six months of 2026, 21 percent more than in the same period of 2025 and the second-highest first-half total in its series. More revealing than the headline count was the composition. CST logged 135 assaults, an 82 percent increase and a six-month record, as well as 126 threats, up 27 percent. Incidents affecting synagogues or people traveling to and from them rose from 89 to 117, also a first-half record.[3]

Not every category moved upward. Damage and desecration reports fell from 94 to 77, while incidents involving mass-produced antisemitic literature fell from 21 to 15. Those are accurate category movements. They do not show that antisemitism in Britain declined, because the overall count increased, assaults reached a record, threats rose, and the monthly average of 321 incidents was almost double the 161 recorded in the six months before October 7, 2023.

A second British case concerns institutional conduct, not a hate-crime charge

On August 26, Britain’s Independent Office for Police Conduct said a former West Midlands Police chief and other serving or former personnel were under misconduct investigation over the 2025 decision to exclude Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from a Europa League match at Aston Villa. An independent inquiry had found that the force overstated the threat from Israeli supporters, relied on inaccurate intelligence, and missed opportunities to consult the local Jewish community.[4]

This is not an antisemitic-crime prosecution. It is an accountability process concerning police decision-making and the reliability of intelligence used to exclude a group of Israeli fans. The watchdog’s announcement means there is an indication that conduct may justify disciplinary proceedings; it is not a finding that misconduct occurred. The distinction is especially important where Israel-related security decisions overlap with the experiences of Jewish communities but do not automatically amount to antisemitism.

United States: fewer recorded incidents, more physical assaults

No new national American incident total was released during the week. The latest two nationwide benchmarks nevertheless answer the central statistical question.

The FBI’s 2025 hate-crime data recorded 1,528 single-bias anti-Jewish hate-crime incidents. They represented 63 percent of the 2,408 religion-based hate crimes reported to the bureau. FBI data cover criminal offenses voluntarily submitted by participating law-enforcement agencies; they are not a count of all antisemitic conduct, and participation and data quality affect year-to-year comparisons.[5]

ADL’s broader audit—which also includes verified noncriminal harassment and vandalism—recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in 2025. That was 33 percent below the exceptional 2024 total, but still 70 percent above 2022 and the third-highest annual total since ADL began tracking in 1979. Physical assaults moved in the opposite direction: ADL recorded 203, up 4 percent and the highest number in its series. Three people were killed in antisemitic attacks, the first such deaths recorded by ADL since 2019, and at least 300 people were victimized in assaults.[6]

The phrase “incidents fell 33 percent” is numerically correct. The conclusion “antisemitism fell 33 percent” is not supported. The former describes movement in one organization’s recorded total from an extraordinary peak. The latter substitutes a wider social condition for a reporting series while ignoring the older baseline and the rise in violence.

France: the headline fell while physical violence rose

France presents the clearest European example of the same problem. The Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive, working with Interior Ministry data, reported 1,320 antisemitic acts in 2025, 16 percent fewer than in 2024. Yet that total remained more than three times the 436 acts recorded in 2022. Antisemitic acts accounted for 53 percent of all anti-religious acts recorded in France, although Jews make up less than 1 percent of the population.[7]

Severity did not follow the headline total downward. Physical violence rose from 106 cases in 2024 to a record 126 in 2025. People were the target in 67.4 percent of recorded acts. A faithful summary is therefore that fewer acts were recorded than at the 2024 peak, while the level remained historically elevated and recorded physical violence increased. The available evidence does not demonstrate a broad decline in antisemitism in France.

France has not published a comparable official national total for January through August 2026. Isolated police reports, complaints, and prosecutions cannot be added into a reliable weekly national trend without a consistent collection system and denominator.

European Union: a new German state record and a persistent measurement gap

A report published on August 26 by RIAS Thuringia documented 418 antisemitic incidents in the German state during 2025, up from 392 in 2024 and the highest annual number since the monitoring body began operating in 2021. The total included 350 cases categorized as abusive behavior, 45 instances of targeted property damage, 10 threats, nine mass mailings, and four attacks. RIAS classified 244 incidents, or 58.4 percent, as Israel-related antisemitism.[8]

The classification does not mean that criticism of Israel was counted simply because it was critical. RIAS reports conduct under its antisemitism criteria; readers should still treat its civil-society monitoring data as distinct from German police crime statistics. Nationally, RIAS documented 8,725 incidents in 2025, nearly unchanged from 8,627 in 2024 but more than three times the 2,480 recorded in 2022. German police separately recorded 6,548 antisemitic crimes in 2025, a 5 percent increase. Different inclusion rules explain why the two series should not be merged.[9]

The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights warned in January that inconsistent definitions, reporting channels, and recording practices still obstruct comparison among member states. Its monitoring report also cited a finding from a survey conducted between January and June 2023: 96 percent of Jewish respondents had encountered at least one form of antisemitism in the preceding year, while very few reported incidents to an authority or monitoring body.[10]

That survey predates the October 7 attacks and the wars that followed, so it cannot measure the subsequent surge. It does establish something essential about the baseline: official and community incident counts capture only part of the lived experience, and underreporting existed before the present period of heightened violence.

Canada, Australia, and New Zealand

Canada

Canada released no new nationwide weekly count. The latest federal evidence includes a Canadian Heritage study of Jewish postsecondary students in which 95.7 percent of respondents said they had experienced or witnessed at least one antisemitic incident in the previous 12 months; 57 percent said they avoided displaying Jewish symbols because of safety concerns.[11] These are survey responses from a defined student sample, not police-confirmed crimes and not a prevalence estimate for every Jewish student in Canada. They nonetheless measure concealment and perceived insecurity—dimensions that annual police totals do not capture.

Australia

Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion completed its ninth and final public hearing block on August 26. The official record says the last block focused on social cohesion; ABC reported that the inquiry had heard from 346 witnesses over 62 hearing days and received more than 20,000 submissions. Commissioner Virginia Bell requested that the final-report deadline move from December 14 to December 18 so that publication would not coincide with the first anniversary of the Bondi Beach attack, in which 15 people were killed at a Hanukkah celebration.[12]

The close of hearings is a procedural milestone, not the commission’s conclusion on causes, institutional responsibility, or the national scale of antisemitism. Those findings remain pending. Some evidence was heard in private because of national-security concerns and the criminal proceedings connected to the Bondi attack.

New Zealand

New Zealand also produced no new weekly national release. The New Zealand Jewish Council’s latest annual report documented 143 antisemitic incidents in 2025, the highest calendar-year total in its series, compared with an average of fewer than 20 a year for most of the decade before October 2023.[13] This is community-monitoring data, not a police census. It is useful for identifying a sharp change within one national series, but it should not be compared directly with the FBI, CST, SPCJ, or RIAS totals.

How an accurate number becomes a misleading conclusion

A statistical statement can be factually accurate and still support an unsupported impression. Five recurring choices produce that effect.

• Peak-to-current comparison: measuring only against the extraordinary 2024 peak can conceal that a 2025 count remains multiples of the pre–October 7 baseline.
• Category flattening: a total treats harassment, vandalism, threats, and assault as countable units without showing changes in severity. In the United States and France, the headline total fell while physical assaults rose.
• Omitted denominators and population context: national totals do not reveal the disproportionate rate at which a small Jewish population may be targeted.
• Underreporting: fear, normalization, distrust, and uncertainty about reporting channels keep incidents outside official and community datasets.
• Concept substitution: “recorded incidents” is a defined measurement. “Antisemitism” is a wider phenomenon that also includes attitudes, concealment of identity, institutional experiences, online exposure, and unreported conduct.

The J7 task force’s most recent cross-country report provides a longer baseline. Across Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, it documented more than 23,000 incidents in 2025. The combined total was 136 percent above 2022, and violent incidents were 97 percent higher. Twenty people were killed in antisemitic attacks in 2025, making it the deadliest year for antisemitic violence in the major Jewish diaspora countries in more than three decades.[14]

J7’s figures remain a compilation of national series with different methods, not a harmonized global crime rate. They are most reliable for showing direction within countries and the broad distance from the 2022 baseline. They do not authorize precise rankings of national prevalence without careful adjustment for definitions, reporting systems, population, and coverage.

Was the framing deliberately manipulated?

The misleading effect can be demonstrated when a lower headline total is presented without its historical baseline, category composition, or violence data. Intent is a separate question.

The public sources reviewed for this edition do not establish a coordinated or deliberate effort by governments, police services, or monitoring organizations to conceal antisemitism. No released instruction, internal document, or repeated documented directive proves such a motive. Some organizations explicitly warn against the misleading interpretation themselves: ADL notes that its lower 2025 total remained historically high while assaults rose, SPCJ describes a durable high plateau in France, and CST compares current British figures with pre–October 7 levels.

That does not make careless public presentation harmless. A headline that turns “fewer incidents were recorded than at the peak” into “antisemitism declined” changes the meaning of the underlying evidence. The effect is demonstrably misleading; whether it is produced by brevity, weak statistical practice, editorial preference, or intent must be established separately in each case.

Conclusion

This week’s verified record contains four guilty pleas in a major attack on Jewish communal infrastructure, a police-misconduct investigation in Britain, the end of Australia’s public inquiry hearings, and a new recorded high in Thuringia. The latest comparable national series remain far above their pre–October 7, 2023 baselines in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Where totals fell, violence, severity, fear, or the longer baseline prevent that movement from establishing a broad decline in antisemitism.

The next major evidence points are Australia’s final royal commission report, requested for December 18; full-year 2026 monitoring data from national Jewish security and reporting organizations; and subsequent official police and hate-crime releases. Until those appear, weekly incidents should be reported as cases, not converted into a trend that the available data cannot support.

Notes and references

1. Metropolitan Police, “Four plead guilty to Golders Green ambulance arson attack,” August 28, 2026.
2. Associated Press, “4 men plead guilty to torching 4 London-based ambulances operated by Jewish charity,” August 28, 2026.
3. Community Security Trust, “Antisemitic Incidents January–June 2026”.
4. Reuters, “UK police officers investigated for misconduct over Israeli soccer fans’ ban,” August 26, 2026.
5. FBI Crime Data Explorer, 2025 hate-crime data; see also ADL analysis of the FBI release, August 17, 2026.
6. Anti-Defamation League, “Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2025”.
7. Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive, “Les chiffres de l’antisémitisme en France en 2025”.
8. RIAS Thuringia / Amadeu Antonio Foundation, 2025 annual findings, August 26, 2026.
9. Federal Association RIAS, “Antisemitic incidents in Germany: Annual 2025”; German Federal Ministry of the Interior, 2025 politically motivated crime statistics, June 9, 2026.
10. European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, “Monitoring and recording antisemitism in the EU,” January 27, 2026.
11. Canadian Heritage, “Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences”.
12. Australian Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, Hearing Block 9; ABC News, final hearing report, August 26, 2026.
13. New Zealand Community Security Group, summary of the New Zealand Jewish Council’s 2025 annual report.
14. J7 Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism, 2025 report summary, July 29, 2026.

summary

The latest evidence does not show a broad decline in antisemitism. Some 2025 headline totals were lower than exceptional 2024 peaks, but incidents remained far above 2022 levels, while physical assaults rose or reached records in the United States, Britain, and France. National methods and underreporting also limit direct comparison.

Frequently asked questions

Did antisemitism decline in the United States in 2025?

ADL recorded 33 percent fewer incidents than in the exceptional 2024 peak, but the 2025 total was still 70 percent above 2022 and the third highest in its series. Physical assaults rose 4 percent to a record 203. The data therefore do not establish a broad decline in antisemitism.

What did the four defendants admit in the Hatzola ambulance case?

On August 28, 2026, four men pleaded guilty to destroying or damaging property while reckless as to whether life would be endangered in the March 23 arson attack on four Hatzola ambulances. A suggested terrorist connection remains an investigative and prosecutorial issue, not a finding established by the pleas.

What do the latest British figures show?

CST recorded 1,926 antisemitic incidents in the first half of 2026, up 21 percent from the same period in 2025. Assaults rose 82 percent to a six-month record of 135, and incidents affecting synagogues or worshippers traveling to and from them reached a first-half record of 117.

Why does France’s lower 2025 total not prove improvement?

France recorded 1,320 antisemitic acts in 2025, 16 percent fewer than in 2024 but more than three times the 2022 total. Physical violence increased from 106 to a record 126 cases. The headline movement and the severity trend went in opposite directions.

Can antisemitism totals be compared directly across countries?

No. Police crime statistics, community incident audits, surveys, and civil-society monitoring use different definitions, thresholds, reporting channels, and coverage. They are most useful for tracking change within the same series and comparing each country with its own historical baseline.

What official data are pending?

Australia’s Royal Commission has requested a December 18, 2026 deadline for its final report. Full-year 2026 community-monitoring reports and later official police and hate-crime releases will provide the next major national evidence points.

Key facts

• Four men pleaded guilty on August 28 over the arson of four Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green.
• CST recorded 135 antisemitic assaults in Britain during the first half of 2026, an 82 percent increase and a six-month record.
• ADL’s 2025 U.S. total was 70 percent above 2022 even after falling from the exceptional 2024 peak.
• France recorded 126 cases of physical antisemitic violence in 2025, up from 106 in 2024.
• RIAS Thuringia documented a record 418 incidents for 2025.
• Australia’s royal commission ended public hearings on August 26 after hearing from 346 witnesses and receiving more than 20,000 submissions.
• FRA says inconsistent recording and underreporting prevent simple EU-wide comparisons.
• J7’s combined 2025 total was 136 percent above 2022, while violent incidents were 97 percent higher.

Important named entities, countries, institutions, and dates

• Countries and jurisdictions: United States; United Kingdom; France; European Union; Germany; Thuringia; Canada; Australia; New Zealand
• Institutions: Metropolitan Police; Old Bailey; Hatzola; Community Security Trust; Independent Office for Police Conduct; West Midlands Police; FBI; Anti-Defamation League; SPCJ; RIAS; European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights; Canadian Heritage; Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion; New Zealand Jewish Council; J7 Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism
• People: Virginia Bell; Hamza Iqbal; Rehan Khan; Saif Ali; Judex Atshatshi; Subhan Ahmed
• Key dates: October 7, 2023; March 23, 2026; August 26, 2026; August 28, 2026; August 30, 2026; requested Australian final-report date of December 18, 2026

Internal-link suggestions

• Previous weekly antisemitism report
• Explainer on antisemitism data and reporting methods
• Country page or archive for France
• Country page or archive for the United Kingdom
• Background article on post–October 7 antisemitism
• Coverage of Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion
• Archive of public-affairs reporting on hate crime and religious freedom