An Italian flag on display in Rome. Photo: Reuters/Guglielmo Mangiapane.

An Italian mayor in the northern Piedmont region received a death threat over the weekend accompanied by a handgun bullet, with a message threatening both him and members of the local Israeli community, prompting renewed fears of escalating antisemitic hostility and politically motivated violence.

Pietro Bondetti, the mayor of Varallo, a town in the Valsesia Valley in northern Italy, received a threatening letter on Friday containing a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson bullet and bearing the headline “F**k Israel.” It was signed by an organization calling itself the “Anti-Zionist Movement.”

The letter, which arrived in the municipality’s regular mail, threatened Bondetti and Ugo Luzzatti, founder of the Baita Project — a large-scale initiative designed to help Israeli families relocate and integrate into the town — accusing them and other local officials of facilitating the “settlement of Nazi-Zionists” in the area.

Over the last two years, the Israeli community in Varallo has expanded significantly through the initiative, which has helped relocate roughly 70 Israeli families to the town, contributing to its demographic revival and the restoration of previously abandoned properties.

“We will not tolerate the transfer of additional families,” reads the letter, which contains 16 lines of hate-filled text. “This is the only warning before we start shooting.”

Bondetti has filed a formal complaint with authorities, prompting local police to launch an investigation into the origins of the threatening message.

“This is a very serious and unexpected act,” the Italian official told the local newspaper La Stampa. “The arrival of Israeli families is a very positive thing for our area.”

“Those who chose to live in the Valsesia valley bought and renovated abandoned homes and brought life back to parts of the town that had been increasingly deserted. The children attend our schools and personally I have never noticed any tension or problem,” he continued.

For his part, Luzzatti said he had never received threats of this nature before, describing the incident as deeply troubling.

“What drives these families to come here and choose Varallo is the search for a place where they can live without tension, without political pressure and without the bloody wars of the Middle East,” he told La Stampa.

Like most countries across the Western world, Italy has seen a rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Across Italy, Jewish communities have faced an increasingly hostile climate marked by vandalism, threats, harassment, and physical attacks, prompting growing concerns among community leaders about the normalization of antisemitic rhetoric and the risk of further violence.

Representatives of the local Jewish community have warned that such incidents become more frequent amid tensions related to the war in Gaza.

In February, the Milan-based CDEC Foundation (Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation) confirmed that antisemitic incidents in Italy almost reached four digits for the first time last year, spiking to record levels.

Of 1,492 reports submitted through official monitoring channels, the CDEC formally classified a record high 963 cases as antisemitic.

By comparison, there were 877 recorded incidents in 2024, preceded by 453 such outrages in 2023 and just 241 in 2022.