A statue of Anne Frank in Amsterdam has been vandalized with red paint for the second time in the past month. On Sunday, a passerby noticed that the words “free Gaza” had been scrawled on the pedestal beneath Frank’s name and her hands were painted red. It was one of six statues across the city to be defaced, with the same words written across the Apollolaan monument to World War II resistance fighters and a statue of Mahatma Gandhi on Churchill-laan street.

The incident was discovered on August 4, exactly 80 years to the day that the Jewish teen was arrested and deported by the Nazis in 1944. Amsterdam police confirmed the attack and said its investigation is ongoing. No suspect has yet been apprehended.

The decision to paint Frank’s hands red appears to imply that the Holocaust victim has “blood on her hands,” a common idiom for when someone is guilty for the death of another. According to a report on the Amsterdam news outlet AT5, the statue was quickly cleaned by the municipal emergency service.

The monument to Anne Frank was also targeted on July 9, when the word Gaza was written in red paint on the base.

“Whoever it was, shame on you!,” said Amsterdam’s mayor Femke Halsema at the time. She added, “no Palestinian has been helped by smearing her so precious statue.”

Blijf met je poten van het beeld van Anne Frank af stelletje Jodenhaters https://t.co/aFRL7WNeq3 pic.twitter.com/yVS9zu8XEp

— Joop Soesan 🇮🇱🇳🇱 (@JoopSoesan) August 4, 2024

“The police must give higher priority to tracking down the perpetrators and the Public Prosecution Service to prosecute the suspects,” said Chanan Hertzberger, chairman of the Central Jewish Consultation told AT5. Others have called for a surveillance camera to be installed near the statue.

Concerns over antisemitic activity have been growing since the war in Gaza started. In June, vandals targeted the home of Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak, hanging up a banner covered with red handprints on which she was described as a “white-suprematism Zionist.” Many cultural sites around the world have become places of peaceful pro-Palestinian protests.

Since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 that killed 1,200 people and saw more than 240 taken hostage, Israel’s ensuing war on Gaza has killed more than 39,000 Palestinians, including more than 15,000 children, and has left an estimated 2.3 million people in the region displaced, according to a recent report by Reuters.

The bronze statue of Anne Frank, designed by Jet Schepp, was unveiled in 2005 in Amsterdam’s Merwedeplein square, where she lived from 1933 until 1942. It shows the teenager holding her possessions as she heads towards her family’s hiding place, turning back to look at her childhood home one last time.

Frank, who is famous for her widely published diaries recounting the years she spent in hiding from the Nazis, died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the age of 16 in 1945.