Five charged with assaulting Tel Aviv hospital guards
Prosecution demands four men be held until trial’s end as part of war on ‘plague’ of hospital violence sweeping country
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter
Four men and a woman were charged Sunday in Tel Aviv 10 days after security cameras captured the men beating up guards at the city’s Ichilov Hospital where the woman, their friend, was a patient.
The prosecution demanded that the four men be detained until the end of the proceedings, saying, “Violence against medical teams has turned into a plague across the country in a manner demanding war and denunciation.”
At the Tel Aviv District Court, Ruslan Misayev (28), Mor Biton (21), Hanan Alfasi (49) and Avraham Yosephov (28) were charged with conspiracy to commit a crime, causing serious injury as a group and group assault causing bodily harm. The woman, Elia Kadosh, 19, was charged with threatening behavior and assaulting a police officer.
A sixth suspect who was also involved, Dudu Amoyal, Kadosh’s partner, has fled the country.
The charge sheet presented by the prosecution described how Kadosh came to the hospital’s emergency center on September 28, accompanied by Misayev, a friend of Amoyal.
At some point, Kadosh began to swear and scream at the medical team that she was not receiving adequate treatment.
One of the security guards noticed her trying to grab the telephone from the head nurse and tried to move her away from the counter, according to the charge sheet.
Kadosh then allegedly turned to Misayev and said something like, “You faggot, why don’t fight back? If my husband were here, he’d tear them apart.”
She allegedly threatened the medical team and the guards and said, “Wait and see what’ll happen to you when my husband arrives.”
Misayev then left and contacted Biton, Alfasi and Yosephov.
The four returned to the hospital accompanied by Amoyal, who spotted one of the guards at the entrance, and shouted to him, “I am your Satan, just wait, not in front of the cameras, I’ll catch you outside.”
"אני השטן שלך, אתפוס אותך בחוץ" – שבועיים לאחר תקיפת המאבטחים, 5 הואשמו באלימות קשה ובהם הדוגמנית בת ה-19 אליה קדוש https://t.co/JfPIuXslEw pic.twitter.com/1Z8GROF0a4
— החדשות – N12 (@N12News) October 8, 2017
The five went into the emergency unit and began attacking four guards, one of whom hit his head on the floor and had to be taken to the trauma unit.
The attackers then fled back to their car with three guards in pursuit. When one of the guards tried to stop Yosephov from getting into the car, Amoyal and the four other men pinned him to the wall and attacked him “without mercy,” beating him in the face, head and all over his body, according to the allegations.
One of the guards needed stitches to his head and had one tooth broken and another damaged, requiring lengthy dental treatment.
Another guard suffered cuts to his head and upper lip, the court heard, while the third sustained bruising and swelling in his head, nose and shoulder.
After police arrived, Kadosh allegedly tried to get away from the unit and when told to sit down, punched a policewoman in the face twice and spat at her.
When tackled to the floor, she allegedly scratched the policewoman’s face, spat at her and tried to bite her, swearing at her throughout.
התקיפה באיכילוב: זה מה שאמרה בחקירתה אליה קדוש בת ה-19, החשודה שדירבנה את חבריה להכות את אנשי הצוותhttps://t.co/ePAID8ogyT pic.twitter.com/enI1aF5mwX
— רשת (@Reshettv) October 3, 2017
Once handcuffed, she allegedly continued trying to spit and kick until police cuffed her feet as well.
Security camera footage of the attack showed the guards being surrounded and kicked and punched by the attackers. The hospital said that the medical and nursing staff were “stunned and frightened by the violence.”
Staff had held a demonstration outside the emergency room shortly before the assault to protest a recent spate of attacks on medical personnel in hospitals.
In a separate incident Saturday, police detained a man who attacked a guard at Beersheba’s Soroka Hospital in southern Israel. The man was a relative of a woman who had just given birth. He was taken for questioning by police who were summoned to the scene.
A week ago, a group representing Israel’s emergency doctors demanded that the government immediately post a uniformed police officer in every ER department to protect staff against what it said was a wave of increasingly violent attacks on its personnel, Army Radio reported.
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