Crying bloody murder

A gruesome double murder in Rishon Lezion with the makings of an American TV drama grabs headlines in the Israeli press. Police are hunting for the suspected perpetrator who shot a woman and her boyfriend. The suspect is the woman’s ex, and the papers report that the murder took place just a few hours after Anastasia Rosnov, 29, left a women’s shelter.

A gag order has been placed on the details of the police investigation, but that doesn’t stop the tabloids from making it the main event in Thursday’s news.

Israel Hayom reports that the woman complained to the police that her ex-boyfriend verbally harassed and threatened her, and that she feared for her life. While she was at the police station on Sunday, it reports, she received a text message from him saying, “I know you’re at the police, get out of there.” Police didn’t manage to find the ex, who’s suspect number one in the murder case. The chilling text message makes for a tantalizing headline in the free daily paper.

For Yedioth Ahronoth, the most horrific aspect of the double murder isn’t just the carnage itself, it’s that Rosnov and her boyfriend, 34-year-old Eliezer Kandinov, had six children between them who are now orphaned. The paper quotes a social worker from the women’s shelter where Rosnov stayed saying they tried their utmost to get her to stay, but “unfortunately our hands are tied, and we can’t force a woman to come to the battered women’s shelter against her will.”

In a stinging criticism of the police, Yedioth Ahronoth’s headline says “Nobody managed to protect Anastasia,” but it isn’t clear who the quote is from — it doesn’t appear anywhere in the article. Haaretz likewise says that it’s not clear how intensive the police’s search for Rosnov’s ex earlier this week, before the shooting, was.

Israel Hayom brings in a social worker who calls for an “Iron Dome” for women at risk. She says the state doesn’t invest enough in measures to protect women at risk of violence from their partners.

Chen Artzi Sror (or Chen Sror Artzi? Yedioth Ahronoth appears to have bungled her name) pens a tug-at-your-heartstrings op-ed in which she bemoans Rosnov’s murder as just another “in a long list of women whose blood was worthless, whom we weren’t able to save despite the fact that the writing was on the wall, large and screaming.” The system, she says, is broken. No leader has stepped forward against the violence against women to “tear it out by the roots”; instead they punish the victim by closeting her off, rather than pursuing the offender.

“There’s a new commissioner in the police; until now he hasn’t excelled in additional mobilization for the weak,” she says. “We have a golden opportunity here to really change public perception of the organization he heads.

“Chief of Police Roni Alsheich, the blood of our sisters is screaming from the ground. Be a leader who will bring the good news, declare total war on violence against women and prove it can be defeated.”

The Rishon Lezion double murder is not the only criminal investigation in the news. The ongoing saga of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s alleged financial misconduct while serving as finance minister remains the top story in Haaretz, which reports that the attorney general met with the state prosecutor’s office and police to see whether there were grounds to open a criminal investigation into the suspected misdemeanors involving flights abroad paid for by foreign entities.

Netanyahu responded to the state comptroller’s report earlier this week by saying all the ministers at the time took flights on someone else’s dime for lack of regulations. Yedioth Ahronoth reports that several ministers who served at the same time that Netanyahu was finance minister in Ariel Sharon’s government (between 2003 and 2005) dismissed that claim as false.

“That’s not true,” says former interior minister Avraham Poraz, one of a handful who spoke out against Netanyahu. “I never traveled on another individual’s dime. I had one trip when I was invited to the United States by the Anti-Defamation League, so I went to the permits committee and it approved funding for the trip. They offered to pay for my wife’s trip, but I didn’t allow it.”

Israel Hayom mysteriously drops the issue altogether, but still manages to include a small article about the US Embassy spokesman leaving for a new position in Kiev, Ukraine. That’s definitely more newsworthy than a possible criminal investigation into the prime minister.

Yedioth Ahronoth, meanwhile, runs a major expose about how doctors in Israel are so overworked and exhausted that they are causing major medical accidents. In one case, a child was left permanently disabled because of a doctor’s error, which he ascribed to severe exhaustion.

“It was five in the morning and I was completely exhausted. Suddenly I saw that one patient’s infusion had the wrong drug. I gave her the drug which does the opposite. Apparently I fell asleep when I administered the drug. I came to help her and I nearly killed her,” one doctor says in another account.