Six men assaulted an Israeli man in London on early on Monday morning after hearing him speak Hebrew on the phone, he told police and the media.

The Israeli, Shalev Ben Yakar, 22, also complained to police about the beating that he said the six men gave him outside the Solomon Hotel in Golders Green, The Jewish Chronicle of London reported on Monday.

“[They caught me] completely off guard. I was not ready. I saw [them] coming [toward] me, and I had a suspicious feeling [about them], but in one second suddenly one of them was running [towards] me and jumped me,” he told the paper.

The attackers kicked Ben Yakar while speaking Arabic and at least one of them asked him: “Are you Jewish,” he said. They set upon him as he was speaking on the phone to Israeli friends in Hebrew outside the hotel, he added.

The Metropolitan Police said in a statement to the Chronicle: “Police were called at 02:05hrs on Monday, May 18 following reports that a Jewish man had been assaulted by a number of men outside a property on The Grove, NW11.” They are investigating the case and trying to ascertain the identity of the perpetrators, they said.

The attackers also tore off some of Ben Yakar’s clothes, including his shoes, which they threw away, he said.

Last month, police beefed up their presence in Golders Green and other heavily Jewish parts of London following a series of attacks, including the torching of four ambulances on March 23 belonging to the Hatzolah Jewish emergency response group. On April 29, a suspected jihadist stabbed two Jews on the street in Golders Green.

In 2025, the United Kingdom had the highest per capita rate of antisemitic assaults of any country with a large Jewish community, according to a report published last month by Israel’s Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Ministry. It recorded 121 violent antisemitic incidents in a country with a Jewish population estimated at between 292,000 and 313,000.

The total number of antisemitic incidents recorded in the United Kingdom last year—including threats, vandalism and intimidation—reached 3,700 cases, a slight increase over 2024 and the second-highest tally on record, the Community Security Trust (CST) watchdog group said earlier this year.

The 2025 tally represents a 4% bump from the 3,556 anti-Jewish hate incidents recorded by CST in 2024. Last year’s total was 14% lower than the highest-ever annual total of 4,298 antisemitic incidents reported in 2023.

The reports indicate a continuation of the elevated levels of Jew-hatred on display in the United Kingdom since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas-led terrorists attacked Israel and triggered a regional war that set off a wave of antisemitic hatred in Western Europe and beyond. In 2021 and 2022, CST recorded 2,261 and 1,662 antisemitic incidents, respectively.

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