Austria recorded the highest number of incidents of Islamophobia last year since it began keeping records in 2015, according to a report released by the Documentation Center on Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Racism.

The center recorded 1,522 cases of racist attacks against Muslims in 2023, the highest number since documentation began in 2015.

Dunya Khalil, head of legal consultations at the center, explained that schools were the first place where an increase in racist incidents was reported, with many incidents being reported by parents, students, and teachers.

According to the report, two-thirds of the documented cases occurred online, while the remaining third occurred in the real world. The majority of the cases involved discrimination at 40.8% and insults at 19.5%. Hate speech accounted for 8.9% of the documented cases, and 2.6% involved physical assaults.

It confirmed that women were the most vulnerable to this racism, with 50.1% of documented cases involving Muslim women compared to 19.5% for Muslim men, while the gender of the rest was unknown.

The documentation center emphasized that its statistics are a snapshot and that the actual number of cases is thought to be significantly higher.