Following the October 7 attacks, and the outbreak of the Gaza war, there has been a surge of anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Arab racism, and Islamophobia. Palestinians have expressed concerns over increased anti-Palestinian racism in mass media and anti-Palestinian hate crimes. Human rights groups have noted an increase in anti-Palestinian hate speech and incitement to violence against Palestinians.
Africa South Africa
In June 2024, a 44-year-old man named Grayson Beare, who described himself as a former Zionist, murdered a 46-year-old woman named Halima Hoosen-Preston and critically injured her husband and her 14-year-old in Durban, South Africa. According to police, the victim's 10-year-old daughter stated at the scene that the suspect said he attacked the family due to their support for Palestine. The assault "allegedly occurred after an altercation Beare had with Hoosen-Preston during which she laughed upon hearing that his cousins had been killed in Israel." However, Beare's family stated that his act was purely criminal. Beare was later admitted to a psychiatric hospital for a mental evaluation.
Asia Bahrain
In October 2023, a doctor of Indian descent in Bahrain was fired from the Royal Bahrain Hospital for anti-Palestinian tweets that were deemed "offensive to our society" by the hospital.
India
A large amount of anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic, pro-Israeli propaganda and disinformation has emerged from India during the war, especially among Hindu nationalists. Anti-Palestinian disinformation from India often comes from supporters of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Europe Belgium On 11 December 2023, The Brussels Times reported that Belgium's Foreigners' Office had instructed municipalities to remove citizenship from Belgian children with Palestinian parents, though a spokesperson for the Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration denied this action was related to the ongoing war.
France
The interior minister of France ordered local authorities to ban all pro-Palestinian protests. French journalist Alain Gresh has said that Emmanuel Macron's Renaissance party has a "very strong anti-Palestinian position".
On 14 October 2023, French-Algerian journalist was arrested while covering a pro-Palestine protest in Paris. He told +972 Magazine that people were getting "strangled by the police", and that the police fined him for participating in an "illegal demonstration" despite showing his press card. He also claimed that the police threatened to break his legs if they saw him again at a protest.
Germany
Palestinians in Germany described facing repression from authorities when they attempted to protest in support of Palestine, being subject to crackdowns, arrests and possible racial profiling. On 18 October 2023, a video of German police stomping out a candlelight vigil for dead Palestinians was seen circulating on social media. Pro-Palestinian protesters in Neukölln were faced with displays of excessive force, including the use of pepper spray and water cannons. Hanno Hauenstein of The Nation described "a climate of fear" in the country created by the Israel–Hamas war, exacerbated by "hard-line" actions from the government. One Palestinian human rights advocate called Germany's response to these protests as "McCarthyism in the purest sense", and a protester told Al Jazeera English that she was unsure "whether we actually have freedom of speech in Germany [regarding Palestine]". The Berlin senate administration has granted schools in the capital the power to ban a number of Palestinian symbols, such as the Palestinian flag and the keffiyeh.
In response to these restrictions, human rights organizations urged authorities to ensure and enable the right of all individuals to express their opinions and peacefully assemble. Germany also faced criticism from Muslim countries such as Indonesia, who argued that they were preventing peaceful protesters from publicly showing support for Palestinians.
On 10 October 2023, a teacher hit a student in Berlin for waving the Palestinian flag.
On 13 October 2023, LitProm abruptly cancelled a LiBeraturpreis for Palestinian author Adania Shibli for her book Minor Detail, a novel partly based on the true story of a rape and murder of a Palestinian girl in 1949 by Israeli soldiers; it was originally set to be given at the Frankfurt Book Fair on 20 October. Following this, more than 1,000 authors and publishers – including Colm Tóibín, Hisham Matar, Kamila Shamsie and William Dalrymple, as well as Nobel prize winners Abdulrazak Gurnah, Annie Ernaux and Olga Tokarczuk – signed an open letter criticizing this decision, saying that the Book Fair had "a responsibility to be creating spaces for Palestinian writers to share their thoughts, feelings, reflections on literature through these terrible, cruel times, not shutting them down".
On 13 November 2023, an Afrofuturism exhibition by curator Anaïs Duplan was suspended by Museum Folkwang after they expressed support for Palestine and "personally tak[ing] sides with the BDS campaign" on Instagram. The next day, Indian poet Ranjit Hoskote resigned from his position at the curator-finding committee of Documenta, after the exhibition publicly criticized him for signing a BDS India letter in 2019, calling it "explicitly anti-Semitic". The letter in question had denounced a "Zionism and Hindutva" event hosted by the and co-organized by the Indo-Israel Friendship Association; the letter also called Israel an "apartheid state" engaging in "settler colonialism". Over the following two days, the entire committee resigned, citing the social climate created by the Israel–Hamas war in an open letter, and Documenta's "unchallenged media and public discrediting" of Hoskote in particular.
Masha Gessen (a Jewish, Russian-American journalist who lost family members in the Holocaust) wrote an essay on 9 December 2023, arguing that Germany's remembrance culture regarding the Holocaust was being used as a "cynically wielded political instrument" by the AfD to target Muslim immigrants. Gessen condemned the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October, but was also critical of the Israeli bombings of the Gaza Strip, which they considered to be highly destructive and comparable to an Eastern European ghetto "being liquidated" by the Nazis. Following this, the Heinrich Böll Foundation announced that they were withdrawing their support for Gessen winning the Hannah Arendt Prize, rejecting the comparison of Gaza to a Jewish ghetto as "unacceptable".
In February 2024, Palestinian Basel Adra and Israelian Yuval Abraham were awarded at the best documentary prize 74th Berlin International Film Festival for their documentary No Other Land. In their acceptance speeches, Adra called for an end of German arms export to Israel, while Abraham criticized a “situation of apartheid” leading to different rights for the two film makers. Abraham also called for a ceasefire in Gaza as well as a "political solution" for the end of the Israeli occupation. Several other film makers also expressed solidarity with the Palestinian cause at this event. The October 7 attacks were mentioned once in an opening statement by the Berlinale co-director. Multiple German politicians sharply criticized the statements at the gala as antisemitic or anti-Israelian, with Greens politician Claudia Roth calling them "shockingly one-sided and characterised by deep hatred of Israel", despite visibly clapping in footage of Adra and Abrahams speeches.
The Neukölln district council of Berlin passed a motion advocating for the use of brochures in high schools that dismissed the historical realities of the Nakba as "myth".
Nancy Fraser, a Jewish American philosopher, was appointed visiting professor at the Albertus-Magnus-Chair of the University of Cologne to deliver lectures about "Three Faces of Capitalist Labor: Uncovering the Hidden Ties among Gender, Race, and Class" in May 2024. But on 10 April 2024, the university abruptly disinvited her for signing the solidarity letter "Philosophy for Palestine". Fraser called the decision to disinvite her "philosemitic McCarthyism".
A Palestine Congress conference, scheduled on the weekend of 13–14 April 2024 at Berlin and organized by various Palestinian support groups along with the Germany Branch of European Jews for a Just Peace was prohibited. Ghassan Abu Sittah, incumbent Rector of the University of Glasgow, and Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece, were denied entry into Germany and banned from speaking at the conference. Varoufakis commented on this: "It is clear that Germany's Staatsräson is not about protecting Jews. It is about protecting the right of Israel to commit any war crime of its choice." The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians challenged and succeeded in overturning the ban imposed by German authorities on Abu Sittah.
On 23 August 2024, in his report "Global threats to freedom of expression arising from the conflict in Gaza" (A/79/319), the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression expressed concerns over scope and gravity against protests in Germany: In Germany, the response was among the toughest, imposing a blanket ban on all demonstrations in support of Palestinian people from 7 to 21 October 2023, and pre-emptively banning several such gatherings.
On 29 November 2024, a conference scheduled in Berlin with French historian Vincent Lemire, specialized in the history of Jerusalem, was cancelled. Lemire had come to present the German version of his comic strip "History of Jerusalem" in the Urania center together with his publisher Edmund Jacobi and literary scholar Christian Wolin. Reproaching Lemire for a tweet which criticized the French government for announcing to ignore the ICC arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu, former German deputy Volker Beck refused to discuss with the historian. The Urania center canceled the event at short notice, announcing later that "a controversial debate" would not be possible without Beck.
Following pressure from politicians, public lectures by United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese and Israeli architect Eyal Weizman planned at LMU Munich on 12 February 2025 and Free University of Berlin on 19 February 2025 were cancelled. Eventually, the Berlin event, organized by DiEM25 and the German branch of European Jews for a Just Peace was carried out in the premises of the Junge Welt newspaper despite deployment of riot police in front of and within the event.
In early 2025, several German scientists organizations signed a communiqué demanding that the "universities resist pressure from biased press coverage and politicians and defend university autonomy as well as the freedom of opinion and academic freedom of their staff and students".
In early 2025, Kamal Aljafari, a Palestinian filmmaker and visual artist, relocated from Germany, where he had been living and working in for decades and quitting Berlin for Paris, due to tightening restrictions around Palestinian discourse in the country.
On 6 April 2025, Israeli-German philosopher Omri Boehm, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, was to deliver a speech on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. But his participation was cancelled due to pressure from the Israeli Embassy in Germany. What Boehm wanted to say in his speech is, that the phrase never again is associated to the Lessons of the Holocaust and to all genocides as well. In this view, Boehm argues, never again applies to the "Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023" and "the destruction and starvation in Gaza" as well.