Illustrative: A police car is seen outside Victoria Station in Manchester, England. Photo: Reuters/Phil Noble

British law enforcement say they are receiving calls from Jewish children — some as young as 10 years old — requesting armed police protection for Hanukkah celebrations, as fears and threats against the UK’s Jewish community intensify in the wake of the Bondi Beach massacre and a surge in antisemitic incidents.

Speaking at the Policy Exchange think tank in London, Greater Manchester Police Chief Sir Stephen Watson said fear within the Jewish community has risen sharply after the Yom Kippur terror attack in Manchester and the deadly attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach — with even young children now asking for armed police protection to simply attend Hanukkah parties.

“We are getting telephone calls into Greater Manchester Police day in and day out over the past few days, where you have a group of 10-year-old girls wanting to go to a Hanukkah party — where they should, frankly, be interested in balloons and bicycles — and are requesting armed police officers,” Watson said.

“Jewish children are the only children in our country who, day to day, go to school behind large fences, guarded by armed personnel, with routine patrols around those areas,” he continued. “Our Jewish communities endure a way of life in this country that no one else has to endure.”

“The intolerable has become normalized and is now almost accepted as the way things are,” he added. 

Manchester police have also been investigating reports that people celebrated last week’s terror attack at Bondi Beach — which killed 15 people and wounded at least 40 others — an act Watson described as “sickeningly distasteful.”

Speaking to the panel, Watson also warned that threats to Jewish communities have surged sharply since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

“October 7 marked a dramatic increase in the threat facing our Jewish communities. The level of fear escalated, and it suddenly became clear that this was no longer an abstract issue — the level of security required by the community had risen sharply,” he said. 

“Over recent months, security has gone from being a necessary measure to something that, despite its presence, was unable to protect people on Yom Kippur from being attacked and murdered,” he continued, referring to the terrorist attack earlier this year that left two Jewish men dead.

“We are now in a situation where the dynamics have continued to shift, but not for the better — everything has worsened. The terrorist threat has increased, and both the number and effectiveness of attacks have grown,” Watson said. “Fear, particularly within our Jewish communities, has intensified, and the reasons driving that fear have become more tangible and realistic.”

With antisemitism continuing unabated and threats against Jews and Israelis on the rise, British authorities are stepping up efforts to crack down on antisemitic incitement, targeting anti-Jewish hatred and bolstering both legal and security measures.

On Wednesday, London and Manchester police warned that anyone publicly chanting to “globalize the intifada” — a popular slogan among anti-Israel activists that has been widely condemned as a call for violence against Jews and Israelis — will be arrested. 

“We know communities are concerned about placards and chants such as ‘globalize the intifada,’” London’s Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police said in a joint statement, pledging to “be more assertive” and take decisive action against anyone inciting violence.

“Violent acts have taken place, the context has changed, words have meaning and consequence. We will act decisively and make arrests,” the statement read. 

Shortly after this new measure was announced, local police arrested two individuals “for racially aggravated public order offenses” after they allegedly “shouted slogans involving calls for intifada” at an anti-Israel demonstration in central London, while a third person was detained for obstructing the arrests, the Metropolitan Police said.

Watson explained that slogans such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are not outright prohibited, describing their legality as subjective and context-dependent — though he noted it is banned if shouted outside a synagogue.

He also emphasized that while waving a Palestinian flag is not illegal, doing so outside a synagogue could result in arrest.

“From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” is a popular slogan among anti-Israel activists that has been widely interpreted as a genocidal call for the destruction of the Jewish state, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Palestinians buy vegetables at a market in Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip, November 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa

For years, international NGOs and humanitarian agencies told the world they were working “neutrally” in Gaza. But according to newly declassified Hamas documents, that neutrality never existed.

In a conversation with HonestReporting, NGO Monitor vice president Olga Deutsch explains how Gaza was run not as a normal territory, but rather as a tightly controlled police state where Hamas oversaw almost every aspect of international aid. “No one was neutral or independent in Gaza,” she says. “Hamas controlled everything.”

The documents, seized by the IDF and later declassified, come from Hamas’ own ministries. They show a system in which Hamas approved NGO staff, tracked individual employees, and controlled which projects and grantees received funding.

The “Guarantors” Inside Humanitarian Groups

At the heart of this system is something Hamas called the “guarantor.”

Every international organization working in Gaza had a local liaison, many of whom held senior roles inside the NGOs, and at least some of them were identified as Hamas members or affiliates. That person had two jobs: report back to Hamas on what the organization was doing, and make sure foreign staff didn’t see what Hamas didn’t want them to see.

The guarantors watched staff behavior, tapped phones, monitored social media, and filed detailed reports. Those reports graded organizations as “cooperative,” “medium cooperative,” or “non-cooperative” — but even “non-cooperative” groups still had to toe Hamas’ line if they wanted to operate at all.

It wasn’t just about skimming food or supplies. Hamas treated NGOs as a strategic asset: a way to control the population, gather intelligence, and cover military activity. Aid groups working on agriculture near the Israeli border were of particular interest, because those areas overlapped with Hamas infiltration routes and surveillance of the fence.

One internal report describes a Norwegian Refugee Council delegation visiting an elderly couple whose apartment floor was shaking from below. The couple suspected Hamas was digging a tunnel. The delegation, escorted by Hamas officials, ignored the complaint and moved on. No warning was issued, no public statement was given when the delegation later returned home. Just silence.

Why Gaza Is Different — and Why That’s Not an Excuse

Deutsch acknowledges that working under a terror regime poses real risks for aid workers. But she rejects the idea that this explains everything, or excuses anything.

In other conflict zones, she notes, the same organizations have no problem openly labeling groups like Boko Haram or Al-Qaeda as terrorist organizations, even while negotiating access on the ground. In Gaza, by contrast, Hamas is often softened into “militants” or “fighters,” while Israel is frequently accused of crimes that are never substantiated.

Gaza is also structurally unique. In many war zones, international staff live in fortified compounds separate from the local population. In Gaza, NGOs live and work inside the civilian areas, making it easier for Hamas to monitor their every move — and harder for them to claim they don’t know what was going on.

But whatever the operational challenges, Deutsch says the line was clearly crossed when organizations not only adapted to Hamas rule but then turned around and accused Israel of crimes while hiding what they knew about Hamas’ tactics.

From “Neutral NGOs” to Narrative Warfare

The documents also confirm what Israel has long said about Hamas’ use of hospitals and medical centers.

According to Deutsch, Hamas records show that every hospital and medical center in Gaza had a Hamas wing, with at least one tunnel linked to many of these sites. All the international organizations working there knew that Hamas used protected civilian infrastructure for meetings, medical treatment of operatives, and military activity.

Yet when the IDF struck near these sites after October 7, many of the same humanitarian groups were among the first to accuse Israel of targeting civilians or attacking hospitals, without mentioning Hamas’ presence at all.

Deutsch says part of the problem is what NGO Monitor calls the “halo effect.” NGOs are treated by journalists, politicians, and the public as uniquely trustworthy — as if their reports are objective, apolitical snapshots of reality.

In practice, many of these organizations arrive in Gaza with political assumptions already formed by the media and activist networks back home. They then produce reports that reinforce those assumptions, which are eagerly picked up by international outlets and quoted as fact.

Journalists have told Deutsch they “have to stay neutral,” which, in the Israel-Hamas context, means refusing to label Hamas a terrorist organization even when their own governments have done so. At the same time, these outlets unquestioningly quote casualty figures and narratives that originate with Hamas-controlled institutions.

The result is a vicious cycle: NGOs produce politicized reports, the media amplifies them, and then new NGO staff and donors absorb those narratives as the starting point for their own “humanitarian” work.

From Durban to October 7: This Didn’t Start Yesterday

The entanglement of NGOs, politics, and anti-Israel campaigning is not new. NGO Monitor itself was founded after the 2001 UN Durban Conference in South Africa, where international NGOs embraced the edict that “Zionism is racism” and committed themselves to using human rights language as a strategic weapon against Israel.

What has changed, Deutsch argues, is the intensity. In the last decade, and especially since October 7, accusations that once lived on the fringes — genocide, apartheid, deliberate starvation — have moved into the mainstream language of humanitarian organizations.

At the same time, record levels of antisemitic incidents in North America and Europe have not been treated by major human rights giants as a central human rights crisis, even as those same organizations repeatedly single out Israel.

What the Documents Show — And Why It Matters Now

The Hamas documents at the center of NGO Monitor’s report were seized by the IDF in Gaza and later declassified. Most come from Hamas’ Ministry of Internal Security — the same body responsible for policing dissent, internal surveillance, and managing foreign organizations. A smaller number are linked to the ministries of education and agriculture, where project activity overlapped.

NGO Monitor translated and analyzed thousands of pages, connecting Hamas’ internal tracking of NGOs with publicly available information on the same organizations and their funding.

Deutsch says the timing of the report is critical. As the international community debates how to rebuild Gaza, estimates for reconstruction have reached around $70 billion. If that money is channeled into the same systems that existed before October 7, she warns, the world will simply rebuild the infrastructure that allowed Hamas to thrive.

For individual donors who want to help civilians but fear enabling Hamas or politicized NGOs, Deutsch’s advice is simple: do basic due diligence.

Check an organization’s public statements and social media. See what it says about Israel, Gaza, and the war. Ask whether it operates in Gaza or the West Bank, and what projects it funds there. If the group regularly accuses Israel of genocide, apartheid, or deliberate starvation, that should trigger serious questions.

“Money should be conditional,” she says. “The same logic you use to choose a doctor or a school should apply to the charities you support. Don’t send money blindly.”

A Moment of Choice

Deutsch has been presenting this report in parliaments and policy forums across Europe. For her, the stakes go far beyond the Israeli–Palestinian arena.

The way NGOs, governments, and media handle Gaza’s reconstruction will signal whether the international system is willing to confront how human rights and humanitarian language have been weaponized, or whether it will simply pour money back into an unreformed structure controlled by a terror group.

“If we don’t learn from what these documents show,” she says, “we’re not just failing Israelis or Palestinians. We’re undermining the credibility of humanitarian work and the democratic societies that depend on it.”

To read the full report and learn more about the organization’s critical work, visit ngo-monitor.org

HonestReporting is a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

(JTA) — Shortly after Thanksgiving, my children develop a refrain: “We have to start decorating for Hanukkah!” They pull out a plastic bin stuffed with decorations — some purchased at Target, others created at their Jewish day school — and transform our front window. They hang metallic dreidel cut outs along the frame. They press gel letters spelling “Happy Hanukkah” against the glass and move a credenza in front of it, arranging the menorahs on top, eagerly awaiting the first night’s candle-lighting.

It’s the kind of scene my grandparents would hardly recognize. Decorations were for Christmas, not Hanukkah. And in the late 1980s, when I was a child, there weren’t many Hanukkah decorations to buy, even if you had wanted them. Global manufacturing had not yet turned every holiday into an aisle of seasonal merchandise.

Some traditionalists might see these store-bought decorations and new customs as inauthentic or overly Americanized. But this doesn’t make my children’s version of Hanukkah “less authentic.” It is simply shaped by a different material and cultural world. Religion, after all, evolves with the people who practice it. My awareness of global, distinct Jewish traditions — whether from Israel, India, Morocco, Argentina or elsewhere — as well as my access to goods from around the world have allowed my family to expand our practices. As my children have grown, my family has experimented, borrowed and adapted. A holiday that once unfolded quietly around the kitchen table now spills out onto our windows and our social media feeds.

For some in the Jewish community, this kind of cultural adaptation reflects a worrying sign of assimilation while for others, a marker of renewed Jewish visibility. But this is not a sign of either decline or triumph. It is what religious life has always looked like — religious expression is continuously shaped by the shifting cultural contexts in which its practitioners live. And once we understand religion as something shaped by people, not simply imposed from above, it becomes clear why attempts to rigidly define it are so misguided.

This is especially true when it is political leaders who try to define what religion should be. Whether the claim comes from the far left, insisting that certain places are too sacred for politics, or from the far right, insisting that real Americanness requires a specific Christian expression, the instinct is the same: to fix religion – and religious expression – as rigidly defined.

The danger of trying to fix religion into a single, approved form is not abstract. When religious expression is narrowed — politically, culturally or physically — it becomes easier to mark some expressions as illegitimate, threatening or disposable. In moments like the shooting in Sydney, which targeted Jews publicly practicing Hanukkah, we see the deadly consequences of a world that struggles to tolerate visible religious difference.

In recent months we’ve seen statehouses mandate the display of the Ten Commandments, often framed through explicitly Christian interpretations, in public schools, while, on the left, some now contend that synagogues should bar certain political themes, reasoning that “sacred spaces” must not be used for events they view as morally or legally objectionable. These impulses differ politically, but they share a desire to police the sacred.

But that’s not how religion actually works. Religious communities are rarely politically neutral and they’re rarely politically uniform. They argue about values, practice, leadership, ethics and identity. They evolve. They absorb the cultures around them. Sometimes contributing and sometimes resisting. The result is not a single expression of religiosity, but a layered tapestry, vibrant and often contradictory. And this debate isn’t uniquely Jewish: Catholic parishes, Black churches, and Muslim communities, among others, are all wrestling with what belongs in their sacred spaces and who gets to decide.

And Hanukkah, of all holidays, should make us suspicious of neat categories. The Maccabees were zealots who not only fought imperial rule but also battled other Jews whom they viewed as insufficiently observant. Yet when Jews came to America, they retold the story of Hanukkah as one about religious freedom — of a small band of Jews, resisting an oppressive empire. The Jewish community in America elevated a once-minor holiday to a new cultural context.

Hanukkah’s evolution shows how religious traditions are shaped by the people who practice them, in the places where they take root, and through the cultural exchanges that surround them. This is precisely why attempts to rigidly define religion now threaten a core tenet of liberal democracy: religious pluralism.

This elasticity is not a weakness of religion. When politicians announce that houses of worship must be apolitical, they are projecting a sanitized ideal on communities that are always grappling with moral questions of their time. When others call on religious institutions to endorse candidates or crusade for partisan causes, they are treating religion as a tool rather than a living tradition.

In both cases, the beautiful variety of actual religious life  is at risk of being lost, threatened by a single official version that bears little resemblance to the lived reality of communities like mine. If we want a healthy democracy, we must resist efforts — from the left or right — to freeze religion into a single, approved form.

That’s why Hanukkah decorations in my window feel especially meaningful this year. They’re not a celebration of purity, or a symbol of moral certainty. They are a reminder of the centrality, and fragility, of religious pluralism to American public life.

Pluralism isn’t about keeping religion out of the public square, and it’s not about demanding that religion speak with one voice. It’s a recognition that healthy democracy depends on many traditions, stories, and forms of expression, none complete on their own. It’s a recognition that America is richer when different communities bring their customs into view, even if those customs evolve or look unfamiliar to previous generations.

When my children decorate our window, they are doing what children in every generation have done, creating and contributing to their tradition through the world they inhabit. And when the candles are lit for each night, they illuminate not a message of religious purity, but the possibility of a society where diverse practices and identities can coexist — messy, imperfect, real and not without risk. That, to me, is a miracle worth publicizing.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

The post When my children decorate for Hanukkah, I don’t just see pride. I see pluralism in action. appeared first on The Forward.