A statue of Anne Frank in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Nov. 26, 2010. The statue was defaced with graffiti reading “Gaza” on July 9, 2024. (Gus Maussen via Creative Commons)

(JTA) — A statue of Anne Frank in Amsterdam was defaced Tuesday, with the word “Gaza” painted in red on the base.

The statue sits in a public park near the famous annex where Frank and her family hid from the Nazis, and where they were later discovered.

Mayor Femke Halsema condemned the graffiti, and police are investigating.

“How can you bring yourself to do such violence to her memory?” Halsema wrote on social media. “Whoever it was, shame on you! There is no excuse for this. No Palestinian is helped by defacing her precious image.”

The graffiti is the latest of a growing number of incidents in which pro-Palestinian activists appear to be associating the war in Gaza with the Holocaust. The Amsterdam statue was not the first Holocaust or Anne Frank memorial in Europe to be defaced since Oct. 7.

In November, a pro-Israel Anne Frank mural in Milan, Italy, depicting the Jewish Holocaust victim holding an Israeli flag, was covered with graffiti reading “Gaza Free.”  Around the same time, a Holocaust memorial boulder in Copenhagen, Denmark, was covered with graffiti and a nearby amphitheater was painted with an image of the Palestinian flag and the words “Free Gaza.”

Some Holocaust sites in the U.S. have also been targets of pro-Palestinian activists. Earlier this month, the phrase “Genocide in Gaza” appeared written in pen on Seattle’s Holocaust museum; police determined the act was not a hate crime.

Many pro-Palestinian activists have charged Israel with committing genocide in Gaza — an accusation that Israel and its supporters vehemently deny. Recently the University of Minnesota hired a scholar who accused Israel of genocide to direct its Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies before rescinding the offer amid backlash.

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