Five Jewish teens arrested for ‘racially motivated’ attack on Arab
Police say suspects assaulted their victim near Jerusalem park last week, stole his cellphone
Stuart Winer is a breaking news editor at The Times of Israel.
Five Jewish teens were arrested for attacking an Arab in Jerusalem and stealing his cellphone in what police said was “a distinctly racial incident,” the Hebrew language Ynet website reported on Monday.
The victim of the attack, who was not identified in the report, required medical treatment for light injuries.
Netanel Golenberg, 19, and the four other suspects were brought before the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court to be remanded into custody.
“This is clearly a racist incident,” police representative Pinhas Sari Levi told the court at the start of the hearing.
Four of the suspects were not named in the report, apparently because they are minors.
On Wednesday morning of last week, the suspects allegedly encountered the victim near the capital’s Liberty Bell Park, attacked him, and took his phone. Police investigated whether or not there was a verbal confrontation between the Jewish suspects and the victim that led to the violence.
The phone was later found in the possession of one of the suspects.
Public defendant attorney Motti Refaeli, representing Golenberg, insisted that his client did not take part in the actual attack and that it was carried out by the other suspects. However, Judge Joya Skappa Shapira noted that the evidence indicates Golenberg, who has three previous convictions for property and violent crimes, did take part and extended his arrest for three days.
Tensions between Jews and Arabs have risen during a five-month wave of violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Twenty-nine Israelis and three foreign nationals have been killed in a wave of Palestinian terrorism and violence since October of last year.
Some 190 Palestinians have also been killed, about two-thirds of them while attacking Israelis, and the rest during clashes with troops, according to the Israeli army.
A number of Israelis have also carried out revenge attacks on Arabs.
At the beginning of the month, prosecutors pressed charges against four 17-year-old Jews suspected of a “racially motivated” assault on two Arab men in the coastal city of Netanya.
The four were being charged with “racially motivated aggravated assault,” the Justice Minister said in a statement at the time.
AFP and Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
