Israeli soccer fans targeted in the horrific antisemitic attack in Amsterdam described Friday how they were chased through the streets along with Jewish women and kids and left with broken teeth and black eyes.
“It was a pogrom. If there had been Internet in ’38, that’s what Kristallnacht would have looked like,” a shaken victim told the Israeli media outlet Haaretz.
An Israel Defense Force officer in town for Thursday night’s soccer game told The Post that his friend was senselessly beaten by a group of 15 thugs till the bloodied pal shouted, “Free Palestine!’’
An Israeli-American tech worker added, “These attacks resurfaced October 7 for us.”
“The whole thing felt pre-planned,” said the man, who spoke to The Post on condition of anonymity.
“We didn’t see any police anywhere.”
Five Israelis were hospitalized when scores of hateful thugs coordinated their assaults and hounded any Jewish people they could identify after a soccer match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and AFC Ajax.
At least 62 people were arrested for participating in the onslaught.
“I saw a car-ramming, kicking on the ground, fans being beaten up,” another witness told Haaretz.
The 40-year-old man said he and his friends walked past four men who hurled antisemitic slurs at them as his group attempted to walk from the central train station to a hotel.
One of his friends separated from the group to walk to a different hotel, and a car swerved toward him and he was forced to jump out of the way at the last second, narrowly staving off catastrophe.
“This is not a soccer hooligan thing, this is a pre-planned attack of Muslims against Israelis and Jews,’’ the man said.
The organization Stop Antisemitism Now posted screenshots of messages allegedly passed around by the organizers of the attacks plotting the horrific violence on X.
“PART 2 JEWISH HUNT they won’t go to the casino anymore,” reads one vile message.
Another hissed, “Blocking the players bus of those f–king Jews.’’
The IDF soldier said he was not with his friend at the time but that the pal told him “he was caught on the street near his hotel, a group of about 15 … started shouting, ‘Where are you from?’ ”
The soldier, who could not speak on the record without official authorization, said it was obvious from his friend’s blue and yellow shirt he was a supporter of Maccabi Tel Aviv, and the violent mob proceeded to beat him senselessly.
“Before he could answer, they choked him, punched him and held him. He was lying on the floor bleeding, and they didn’t leave him until he shouted ‘Free Palestine!’ ” the officer said.
The man managed to escape when a group of Israelis came to his rescue.
The IDF soldier says another friend of his was mugged and robbed of everything he had.
David Yerman, an Israeli copywriter who was in the city at the time, told The Post that the violence was all too tragically typical for Jews today.
“When you live in Israel, you’re used to it,” he said.
Yerman, 28, said he decided to turn his hotel room into a refuge for Israelis to flee the violent chaotic scenes outside.
He hosted 10 other Israelis in his room, and he slept on the floor.
His four friends did the same in their rooms.
“My friend ran for his life down an alley as a group of 15 … chased him. He managed to link up with another victim who was bleeding from his head, and the two managed to hide in his apartment,” Yerman said.
“I learned a lot about my grandfathers and what they experienced in the Holocaust. It’s like what I learned in school.”
“I was hiding people in my hotel so they wouldn’t be killed for being Jews,” he said, his voice breaking in rage.
Another tech worker, a 30-year-old developer, told The Post that the local cops should have been prepared because the violence had actually begun the night before.
“My friends got beaten up outside a casino the previous night,” he said.
The man, who also requested not to be identified, said that the night before, there were just a handful of attacks throughout Amsterdam, and the rough-and-tumble soccer fans were not afraid the following day since they assumed the police would be on top of things.
But after Maccabi Tel Aviv’s stinging 5-0 loss to the Dutch team Ajax, the man quickly realized that the second night would be “worse than the first night,’’ he said.
“I saw a lot of attacks, I saw a lot of people trying to attack but a lot of fans trying to defend themselves,” the Israeli soccer fan said.
The assailants would gang up on victims 15 or 20 to 1, he said.
The soccer fan said he and his friends decided to form a rescue team and roam the streets in search of any lone Israeli who needed their help.
They found a group of four hiding out in a locked restaurant as armed thugs tried to break in and pelted the windows with rocks.
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He and his buddies scared the group off and escorted the Israelis back to their hotel.
“The Amsterdam police didn’t really try to help us,” he said, and claimed that the police inaction was due to a mixture of antisemitism and “fear” of the city’s immigrant Muslim population.
“When you see the Jews getting attacked and you do nothing and you tell the Jews you need to go where I say until I decide you can leave but you don’t do anything to the Muslims, there is something problematic about it,” he said.
“Everyone was telling us that we need to go back to Israel, need to leave Amsterdam and go somewhere else in Europe, but we didn’t do anything.”
Israeli photographer Ami Shuman recalled having to walk through the sickening scenes with his son surrounded by a police escort as they tried to return to their hotel unscathed.
“We saw violence, we saw people with black eyes, deep cuts under their eyes,” he told the Times of Israel.
Maccabi fan Tomer Taliasn added to the outlet, “They didn’t distinguish between women, child, men or the elderly.
“They attacked everyone they saw as Israeli.”
