A banner lauding “Palestinian resistance” at a pro-Hamas demonstration in Paris on Dec. 9. Photo: Reuters/Eric Broncard

Police in France have launched an investigation after a man armed with a knife entered a Jewish daycare center in a Paris suburb where he threatened its female director with rape and mutilation, citing the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in southern Israel as inspiration.

“You’re a Jew, you’re a Zionist. Five of us are going to rape you, cut you up like they did in Gaza,” the unidentified intruder told the terrified director, whose name was given in French media outlets as Delphine.

The incident occurred on Tuesday afternoon at “Les Mini Kids,” a daycare center in the Paris suburb of Val-de-Marne. Wielding a knife with a six-inch blade, the intruder entered the center with his face uncovered, heading for the director’s office. After making his threats, he fled the scene and remains at large. None of the infants who were at the daycare center at the time witnessed the incident. The center caters to infants under the age of two, many of whom are Jewish, and displays mezuzahs — small boxes containing sacred Jewish texts — on its door frames.

Interviewed by broadcaster Europe 1, Delphine said that the encounter had left her in a state of profound shock, and that the center would be closed until further notice.

“I’m afraid,” she said. “I can’t tell myself that I’m going to reopen a nursery where I welcome babies, parents. We’re going to see psychologists, to see how it evolves and that this trauma does not end in depression, or even more.”

She added that “for now, parents do not want to come back at all; there are some who want to remove the children from the nursery altogether.”

Asked how she had responded when faced with the intruder, Delphine said that she didn’t react.

“I was like stone. I’m not even sure that I was able to breathe,” she said.

Antisemitic acts have risen precipitously in France since the Oct. 7 atrocities and the subsequent bombing and invasion of Gaza by Israeli forces. In an interview with broadcaster BFMTV on Wednesday, David-Olivier Kaminski, a member of the executive board of Crif, the French-Jewish representative organization, noted that in Paris alone, there had been nearly 500 antisemitic outrages since the Hamas pogrom — an increase of 330 percent on the previous year — and 175 arrests.

“It creates a stressful situation, but French Jews want to hold their heads high,” Kaminski remarked.