Israeli Survivors of Oct. 7 Massacre Detained, Mistreated by British Officials at UK Airport, Jewish Leaders Say

Two Jewish, Israeli nationals who survived Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel were detained and subjected to discrimination while being processed at Manchester Airport in the United Kingdom on Sunday, a local Jewish civil rights group has charged.

The Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester & Region (JRC) on Monday sent a letter alleging that two Israeli men who had traveled to the UK to discuss narrowly escaping Hamas’ attack on the Re’im Music Festival — where Palestinian terrorists para-glided into the venue, murdered more than 300 young people, and kidnapped dozens of others on Oct. 7. — were singled out by multiple British Border Force officers upon presenting their Israeli passports and explaining why they were there. According to the letter, the officers forced the Israelis to submit to two hours of “detention and interrogation,” as well as abusive comments.

“The only reason for their detention and interrogation was because they are Israeli. We are in possession of a video which shows a male officer speaking in aggressive terms to the two males,” JRC alleged in the letter. “They were detained for two hours. When finally released, the same Border Police Officer said, ‘they had to make sure that you are not going to do what you are doing in Gaza over here.’”

JRC condemned the officers’ “discriminatory treatment” of the men, describing it as antisemitic “abuse” warranting an investigation by the British government and the Manchester Airport Group as a “matter of urgency.”

“We unequivocally condemn the fact that Israeli nationals were detained and subjected to abuse by a Border Police Officer,” the letter stated. “The comment upon their release proves that this individual was motivated by antisemitic intent.”

On Tuesday, a Manchester Airport communications officer told The Algemeiner that it is not the employer of the two Border Force officers in question but said that the allegations “are serious.” The airport has urged the British Home Office, which oversees the Border Force, to “ensure they are looked into,” an action which Home Secretary James Cleverly vowed to take.

“We are investigating this,” Cleverly, a Conservative Party Member of Parliament, said in a statement commenting on the incident on X/Twitter. “We do not tolerate antisemitism or any form of discrimination. This incident will be handled in line with our disciplinary procedures.”

The alleged abuse of the two Israeli men came amid a historic surge in hate crimes targeting the Jewish community around the world, including paroxysms of antisemitic sentiment and violence, following the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7.

Indignities to which diaspora Jews have been subjected range from last week’s cancelling of the Hamilton Film Festival, which was set to take place next month, to the mobbing of Jewish college students in the US and the stabbing of a 50-year-old Jewish man in Zurich, Switzerland. The UK Jewish community is already reeling from another outrage reported earlier this month, the alleged abuse of a 9-year-old Orthodox Jewish boy by Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital nurses, clad in pro-Palestinian “badges and stickers,” who forced him to undergo a blood transfusion on the floor.

As The Algemeiner has previously reported, antisemitic incidents in the UK have occurred in unprecedented numbers since Oct. 7. In 2023 alone, there were upwards of 4,000, and in London, a city home to Europe’s largest concentration of Orthodox Jews, there were 1,177, an average of just over three per day. In one brutal case, two Black females mercilessly battered a Jewish woman, pounding her with punches and then kicking her while she lay on the ground unconscious. Aware of the damage they wrought on the defenseless woman, the assailants, still standing over her body, speculated that she was “dead.” Not 10 days later, someone graffitied a bus stop outside a Jewish girls school, spray painting a blue Star of David and defacing it with a large “X,” spray painted in black.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.