abstract: We present a novel method to detect multipartite entanglement, based on a relation between entanglement of a many-body system and its diffractive properties. The link is given by structure factors. Based on these, we provide a general analytical construction of multi-qubit entanglement witnesses, that contain two-point correlations. They could be either measured in a scattering experiment or via local measurements, depending on the underlying physical system. For some explicit examples of witnesses we analyze the properties of the states that are detected by them. We further study the robustness of these witnesses with respect to noise.