Hateful anti-Israel vandals unleashed live crickets and splattered red paint across a top Columbia University executive’s Brooklyn apartment building early Thursday, horrified neighbors and sources told The Post.

The unidentified perps set the insects loose in the lobby of Columbia chief operating officer Cas Holloway’s Brooklyn Heights building before breaking a glass door and trashing the outside of the dwelling with red paint in the early morning attack, the sources said.

Before fleeing, the vandals plastered threatening posters on the outside of the building that brandished the Ivy League executive’s name and photo as they criticized his handling of the violent anti-Israel protests that plagued Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus earlier this year.

They gloated, too, about leaving the crickets for Holloway as a “present.”

“Did you enjoy our present? Did it make you uncomfortable? What you felt was incomparable to the pain you made Columbia students feel when you signed off on their brutalization because they stood against the genocide of Palestinians,” the note said.

“P.S. Even when the crickets are gone from your apartment, the memory will remain.”

Disturbed residents alerted cops to the vandalism at about 3 a.m., the NYPD confirmed.

Officers were spotted inside the lobby later Thursday morning picking up a can that was apparently filled with the creepy crawlers before bagging it up as evidence.

The soda-sized can had the words “live insects” scrawled across it.

Meanwhile, red paint could still be seen splashed across the building’s entryway as cops cordoned off the area.

The saga outside the Columbia exec’s apartment is the latest in a string of near-identical incidents that have plagued the Big Apple in recent months.

It came just one day after a New York City journalist was busted for allegedly joining a group of antisemitic vandals that recently splattered red paint on several homes — including the nearby apartment of the Brooklyn Museum’s Jewish head.

Separately, pro-Palestinian protesters made headlines last month for unleashing crickets and maggots inside the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C. as they demonstrated against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit.

Meanwhile, the Columbia exec’s horrified neighbors decried the latest incident outside their home, telling The Post that such vandalism won’t solve anything.

“They are protesting all these institutional investments in Israel — that’s what they say it is. It’s not helping the situation,” one tenant, who didn’t want to be named, said.

“I’m not scared, just mad,” she added. “Protesting is great, but not like this.”

“It’s good to try and help people but I don’t see this helps anyone. If you ask a Palestinian in Palestine, will they say this helped? I don’t think so,” Jeff Drew, who has lived in the building since 1998, said.

“It sucks but you know we will clean it up, it’s sucks, it sucks,” he said of the vandalism.

“I’m more frustrated by people who think like paint is going to impact whatever they want changed.”

The Post reached out to Holloway but didn’t hear back immediately.