At 11:30 a.m. on Monday, June 22, 2026, gunfire erupted at the intersection of Trans Island Avenue and de Courtrai Avenue in the Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood of Montreal, the heart of Montreal’s Jewish community. Twenty to thirty shots were reported to have been fired next to the Hilton Hotel in the heavily Jewish area. When the shooting stopped, three people were dead: Montreal Police Constable Mohamed Lamine Benredouane, 34, who had joined the force in 2021; Michael Moshe Mizrahi, a Jewish member of the Chabad MADA Community Center; and the gunman himself. A second female officer was seriously wounded.
The attack took place next to numerous kosher restaurants, a Chabad center, Jewish schools, and Jewish community centers. All Jewish businesses and schools in the area were on lockdown. Beth Rivkah Academy, Chabad NDG, the Vaad Ha’ir, MADA, the Chai Center, Yagdil Torah, and several kosher businesses all operate within blocks of the shooting. An emergency shelter-in-place alert went out across Montreal. It was lifted roughly three hours later.
The gunman, later identified by local media as Seth Hatfield from the Canadian province of Alberta, was believed to have driven several hours to reach Montreal before carrying out the attack. He prepared a 104-page manifesto before opening fire, sending it to various media outlets. The manifesto called for a violent revolution against modern capitalist society and attacked police, Jews, women, and pornography.
Mizrahi was originally from Lebanon, had moved to Israel, and later settled in Montreal. He leaves behind a son and two daughters in Israel. ZAKA is working with local authorities to bring his body to Israel for burial. Israel’s Consul General in Montreal wrote on X: “On behalf of the people and the State of Israel, the Consulate extends its sincere condolences to the family of Michel Mizrahi Z”L (zichrono l’vracha, of blessed memory), an Israeli citizen who was killed today in Montreal. This family knows all too well the horrors of terror and violence, making this tragic loss even more painful.”
David Kakon, a member of the Chabad MADA community, described Mizrahi as a man who was “always smiling, always has a kind word for someone else. Loves his family, loves Israel, and loves being a Jew.”
Montreal Police Chief Fady Dagher said the investigation is ongoing and noted it has been 24 years since Montreal lost a police officer in the line of duty. “This was a nightmare, the worst sort of nightmare,” he said. Dagher confirmed police have possession of the manifesto but have not yet concluded whether the attack was an ambush or whether the suspect is part of a wider network.
This Was Not a Surprise
The blood on the streets of Côte-des-Neiges was unforeseeable. It was predicted, in writing, by Israeli officials who watched Canada slide toward this moment and were ignored at every turn.
Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, sent an urgent letter in January to Canada’s Minister of Public Safety, Gary Anandasangaree, warning that Canada’s government itself had already assessed that “the scale and severity of the incidents in Canada were clear warning signs before a disaster.” Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, Chikli wrote, “continues to turn a blind eye to rampant antisemitism in the country.”
The pattern Chikli described was not speculative. Antisemitic incidents surged in Canada by approximately 670% following the Hamas terrorist attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Although Toronto’s Jewish community makes up less than 4% of the city’s population, anti-Jewish hatred accounted for 40% of all hate crimes and 81% of religiously motivated hate crimes in Toronto, according to the Toronto Police Service’s 2024 Annual Hate Crimes Statistical Report. “These figures represent a systemic failure to deter antisemitic violence,” Chikli wrote.
The incidents documented prior to Monday’s shooting form a clear and damning sequence: Jewish schools in Montreal and Toronto hit by gunfire; synagogues in Montreal and Vancouver targeted by arson; an elderly Jewish woman stabbed in Ottawa in August 2025; an Orthodox Jewish father physically assaulted in front of his children in Montreal. Three separate Toronto-area synagogues — Temple Emanu-El in North York, Beth Avraham Yoseph of Toronto in Thornhill, and Shaarei Shomayim in North York — were struck by gunfire within a single week in March 2026.
The Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood itself has been targeted by gunfire in recent years, including incidents in 2023 and 2024, where shots were fired at Orthodox schools.
Chikli drew a direct comparison to Australia before the Bondi Beach massacre. He had warned Prime Minister Albanese, citing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s August 17, 2025, warning that his failure to confront antisemitism would lead to its spread. The Bondi Beach shooting came almost exactly four months later, with 15 people murdered. Chikli then turned to Canada: “The recent antisemitic terror attack in Bondi Beach, Australia, tragically illustrates the lethal cost of ignoring early warning signs and underestimating ideologically driven antisemitic violence. Canada is now exhibiting disturbingly similar indicators. This path leads to a point of no return.”
Canada’s own intelligence apparatus confirmed the threat in a March 18 report by the Integrated Threat Assessment Centre: “The most likely scenario of an attack targeting the Jewish community is a lone actor using unsophisticated methods against easily accessible targets.” A gunman arriving from Alberta with a manifesto and an SKS rifle, opening fire in the most densely Jewish neighborhood in Montreal — that is the scenario they described.
The Connection That Cannot Be Denied
Canadian officials and media will attempt to bracket Monday’s attack as the work of an “incel” loner driven by misogyny, disconnected from the broader climate of Jew-hatred that has consumed Canadian public life since October 7. That framing is a deliberate evasion.
The gunman’s manifesto explicitly targeted Jews alongside police and women. He chose Côte-des-Neiges, which is not a random street corner, but the center of Jewish Montreal, flanked by synagogues, kosher shops, Jewish schools, and the Chabad community center where Michael Moshe Mizrahi prayed. Whether his primary stated grievance was misogyny or political ideology, he arrived in that particular neighborhood with a weapon and opened fire.
This is what normalized Jew-hatred produces. When a government officially recognizes a Palestinian state, as Canada did on September 21, 2025, becoming the first G7 nation to do so, it sends a signal about whose narrative it has chosen. When it permits mass demonstrations where Hamas, Hezbollah, and ISIS flags are openly waved, and crowds shout “Globalize the Intifada” without consequence, it establishes that incitement against Jews carries no cost. When its media, as Mike Fegelman of HonestReporting Canada put it, continues to “downplay, contextualize, and inadequately notify the public, to clearly name what is happening,” it removes the social inhibitions that might otherwise deter a man with a manifesto from driving across a province to kill Jews.
The Bible does not permit any ambiguity on this point. Am Yisrael, the people of Israel, carry a divine guarantee of ultimate protection: “For I am with you, declares the Lord, to save you; though I make a full end of all the nations where I scattered you, I will not make a full end of you, but I will discipline you in just measure, and I will by no means leave you unpunished.” (Jeremiah 30:11). The nations that make themselves instruments of Jewish destruction do not fare well in the long accounting of history.
Michael Moshe Mizrahi, a man who loved Israel, loved being a Jew, and always had a kind word for others, was buried in the land he loved. Canada’s leaders, having been warned repeatedly and explicitly that their choices were leading to this moment, will hold press conferences and extend condolences. But as Chikli said: “At this point, continued inaction is not a failure to understand the problem; it’s a choice. And the consequences of that choice will be measured in more than headlines.”
