Arab bus driver injured in assault by group of young men in Jerusalem; 1 arrested

Three young men assaulted and robbed an Arab bus driver overnight in Jerusalem’s Neve Yaakov neighborhood.

Ahmad Shehadeh, who works for the Extra bus company, was hospitalized with a broken nose after he was attacked at around 1 a.m. Tuesday morning. The assailants choked, punched and kicked the driver, then stole his phone after disembarking, the Bus Drivers Association said in a statement.

Shehadeh, who was operating the 69 line from Givat Shaul north toward Neve Yaakov, a Jewish neighborhood in East Jerusalem, was harassed by the gang throughout the ride, Channel 12 reported.

The gang signaled for the driver to pause at every bus stop along the route. When he skipped one of the stops, the youths approached him and began to beat him, the report said.

Arab media reported the incident as a racially motivated attack, similar to an assault earlier this year on two Arab bus drivers by Jewish fans of the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team who were returning from a lost match.

Police said Tuesday night that they arrested a suspect — a resident of Jerusalem in his 20s — in connection with the attack.

“I don’t get how we’ve reached this point where we [bus drivers] have to be everyone’s punching bag,” said the attacked driver in an official statement from the Bus Drivers Association. “When will they wake up? Only when one of us dies?”

The Extra bus company filed a police complaint regarding the incident.

Ta’al MK Ahmad Tibi called the assailants “a group of young Jewish Kahanists” in a post on X following the incident.

“Had they been Arab, they would have already been arrested. But as Jews, they are protected. This is not just racist violence; it is policy. The national security minister grants them effective immunity, because they are his political base,” the lawmaker claimed.

After being discharged from the hospital, a bloodied and bruised Shehadeh appeared in a video with his coworkers Tuesday morning. Speaking in Arabic, the four bus drivers declared a boycott of bus service to Neve Yaakov until further notice.

“What happened to Ahmad could happen to any driver,” one of his colleagues warned in the video, implying that the attack was racially motivated.

Israel Ganon, the chairman of the Bus Drivers Association, told The Times of Israel that the boycott was a spontaneous undertaking, but that he sympathizes with the striking drivers.

“They’re afraid to come back to work, and I certainly can understand them. If something like this were to happen in anyone’s place of work, he’d be afraid to come back,” he said.

Police recently arrested two 15-year-old boys in connection with a similar incident, which also took place Monday night, in the central city of Elad. The pair, from Elad and Petah Tikva, allegedly pelted a bus with rocks and cursed the driver after he told them to stop smoking during the ride.

The Bus Drivers Association claimed that at least two bus drivers have been attacked — either physically or verbally — every day since the start of 2025.

Ganon said that continued attacks against bus drivers prove that the government must establish a municipal security unit to guard buses in Jerusalem, claiming that the funds already exist for such an initiative.

He alleged a double standard in the treatment of bus drivers, who, unlike Transportation Ministry employees, do not enjoy security guards manning their places of work.

“One day I’d like to see Jerusalem’s licensing division [in the Transportation Ministry] function without a security guard at the front entrance,” he quipped.