Four ambulances belonging to a Jewish volunteer emergency service in north London were torched before dawn Monday in what police are treating as an antisemitic hate crime. The vehicles, owned by the Hatzola Northwest nonprofit and parked in the Golders Green neighborhood, home to London's largest Jewish community, caught fire shortly after 1:40am local time, triggering multiple gas-cylinder explosions that shattered nearby windows and prompted evacuations, authorities said, per CNN and NBC News. No injuries were reported. Metropolitan Police are searching for three suspects seen on surveillance footage approaching an ambulance with what appears to be a bucket and rag seconds before flames erupt, per CNN.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned what he called a "deeply shocking antisemitic arson attack" and urged anyone with information to contact police. Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis described the targeting of Hatzola, which provides free emergency medical services to both Jewish and non-Jewish residents, as a "sickening" assault on shared social values. "You'd like to think that life-saving activities would be sacrosanct, but clearly they're not," a Hatzola first responder tells CNN, noting that the ambulances carry oxygen, "so when you set fire to them, they're going to explode." The incident comes amid a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents in Britain since the Israel-Hamas war began, with the Community Security Trust reporting more than double the number of cases in 2025 (3,700) compared with 2022 (1,662).
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