Three young Syrian men rioted in front of the Jewish Museum in Munich this past weekend, spitting on photographs of Israeli hostages and deceased soldiers before one of the assailants threatened security personnel with a knife.

The incident, first reported by German media, was one of the latest antisemitic cases in a country that has experienced a surge in open hatred toward Jews since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.

During the Gaza conflict, the Jewish Museum has displayed photographs of hostages taken by Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists during their Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel as well as deceased Israeli soldiers, along with candles, to honor and remember them.

On Saturday afternoon, three men — Syrian citizens living in Austria — vandalized the memorial by spitting on it while shouting antisemitic slogans, the German newspapers Süddeutsche Zeitung and Jüdische Allgemeine reported.

After witnessing the attack, two employees from the Jewish community’s security service tried to stop the assailants, who responded aggressively. One of the three men, a 19-year-old, allegedly kicked one of the employees before drawing a knife.

Several police officers assigned to protect the Jewish Center, located next to the museum, noticed the incident and intervened. Soon afterward, more than 30 officers arrived at the scene. Police and security guards had to threaten to use their firearms before the teenager dropped the knife.

According to local police, the man and his two accomplices, a 20-year-old and a 31-year-old, have all been arrested and are under investigation for threats, assault, defamation, and insulting the memory of the deceased.

The Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office has taken over the case, with senior prosecutor Andreas Franck, who also serves as the antisemitism commissioner of the Bavarian judiciary, overseeing the case.

Germany has experienced a sharp spike in antisemitism since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza.

In just the first six months of 2024 alone, the number of antisemitic incidents in Berlin surpassed the total for all of the prior year and reached the highest annual count on record, according to Germany’s Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism (RIAS).

The figures compiled by RIAS were the highest count for a single year since the federally-funded body began monitoring antisemitic incidents in 2015, showing the German capital averaged nearly eight anti-Jewish outrages a day from January to June last year.

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), police registered 5,154 antisemitic incidents in Germany in 2023, a 95 percent increase compared to the previous year.

However, experts believe that the true number of incidents is much higher but not recorded because of reluctance on the part of the victims.

“Only 20 percent of the antisemitic crimes are reported, so the real number should be five times what we have,” Felix Klein, the German federal government’s chief official dealing with antisemitism, told The Algemeiner in an interview in 2023.

Earlier this year, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz condemned the ongoing discrimination faced by the Jewish community, calling it “outrageous and shameful.”

Last month, Germany’s federal parliament, the Bundestag, passed a motion to address antisemitism and hostility toward Israel in schools and universities, seeking to combat a surge in pro-Hamas demonstrations on campuses and antisemitic incidents across the country.

Jewish students at German universities widely expressed a growing sense of insecurity and uneasiness following Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion of southern Israel, amid a slew of incidents purportedly meant to protest the war in Gaza.

The recently passed parliamentary motion stipulates that the federal government — in collaboration with the ministers of education and the German Rectors’ Conference, an association of state and state-recognized universities — must ensure that antisemitic behavior in educational institutions results in sanctions.

“This includes the consistent enforcement of house rules, temporary exclusion from classes or studies, and even … expulsion,” the motion reads.