On-site report from the Paris neighborhood where Sarah Halimi was killed by an Islamist radical

Yisrael Yoskovitch, Paris

It’s Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday marking the end of Ramadan, and young men dressed in gallabiyahs and flowing beards crowd the sidewalks as I’m driven along the Boulevard Périphérique, which divides Paris proper from the heavily immigrant suburban banlieues.

As an Israeli, I feel strange having to wear a mask again — back home, they’ve been out of fashion for a while now. A safety screen separates me from the dark-skinned taxi driver. Parisians don’t take chances when it comes to Covid. He whistles snatches of a wistful chanson, and periodically glances in the rearview mirror to check on his Middle Eastern tourist. There are no smiles.

As we enter the Belleville neighborhood, I’m getting reports about the latest outbreak of hostilities as Hamas and Israel trade blows. But forget distant Gaza — I’m here because of the violence on these very streets. It’s just four years since the horrific murder of Sarah Halimi, a religious Jewish doctor, put Islamic terror and this volatile neighborhood on the map. In Belleville to take up the story that Sarah Halimi’s son Yonatan told in these pages a few weeks ago, I’ve been warned to conceal my Jewish identity. I pull a baseball cap out of my suitcase, don a short windbreaker, and do my best to look inconspicuous.

The driver drops me off on a side street. After a three-minute walk, I reach the address, 30 Vaucouleurs Street. A fire truck is raising its rescue crane to one of the apartments, and a small crowd has gathered outside. I utilize the distraction to slip in unnoticed.

In the lobby, I bump into a resident who demands to know my business. I choose to tell the truth: I’m a Jewish reporter, from Israel, here to see the scene of the crime.

He considers this for a moment before saying, “The appartement is on the third floor. When you’re finished, I’ll be waiting below.”

At the end of the stairway is a worn, brown door draped with red ribbons. A Paris police department notice marks the apartment as a crime scene closed to the public. I retreat. The resident is waiting for me at the entrance of the building. He opens a side door to a small private backyard, and points upward: “That’s the flat.”

“The flat” is the residence of Sarah Halimi Hy”d. Several days before I set out to Paris, France’s top court upheld a ruling that Halimi’s Muslim murderer — her neighbor — could not stand trial because his judgment was “abolished” by drug abuse at the time of the crime. This decision sparked a furor in the French Jewish community and a nationwide series of mass protests.

Now as I stand in the small backyard, the resident points to the spot where Halimi was found. He looks embarrassed and asks not to be photographed.

I try to imagine those horrifying moments. Forty minutes of blood-curdling screams piercing the air. Police officers called to the scene, hearing the woman’s pleas but waiting outside due to regulations forbidding them from entering private homes without a court order between midnight and 6 a.m. When they hear the shouting in Arabic, they realize that’s irrelevant — but then a new problem emerges. In these circumstances, their orders are to await the arrival of elite anti-terror squads trained to handle such situations.

The murderer, Kobili Traoré, uses the interval to viciously beat his Jewish neighbor, all the while yelling “Allahu Akbar” and verses from the Quran. In the end he raises her to the window and throws her to her death in the backyard I’m standing in now.

If Sarah Halimi’s fate left France’s Jews outraged and afraid, four years later, the official response has taken those feelings to a different level. The message whispered at Belleville’s most infamous crime scene, and in conversations with Jewish leaders and activists, is that for France’s political and judicial elites, Jewish blood is cheap.