Israeli man jailed in Egypt for bumping into woman on water slide

Yussuf al-Assam’s father says his family has reconciled with the woman, accuses Foreign Ministry of abandoning his son

An Egyptian court handed an Israeli youth a one-year prison sentence for offending a woman’s honor after she complained he had touched her on a water slide at a resort in Sharm el-Sheikh, the Kan public broadcaster reported Wednesday.

Yussuf al-Assam, 19, from the Bedouin town of Tel Sheva in southern Israel, has been in an Egyptian jail since the incident last April in the Sinai Peninsula. The resort is still popular with Israelis despite ongoing battles in the Sinai between Islamic terrorists and the Egyptian military.

His father, Khaled al-Assam, said Egyptian authorities decided to send his son to prison despite the two families meeting and resolving the dispute. The senior al-Assam said the woman’s family received a compensation payment and the woman herself had forgiven the defendant because she accepted that he did not intend to harm her.

The father claimed the Israeli Foreign Ministry did not help him with the case and did not check on his son’s condition in jail.

Illustrative. Flag of Egypt, behind a judge’s gavel (Getty Images)

“I do not want to think that the Foreign Ministry is making deals at the expense of my son, or what would have happened had he been a Jew,” al-Assam said.

The Foreign Ministry issued a statement rejecting the accusations and saying its staff had been involved.

“This is a case of an Israeli citizen who is receiving full consular services from the embassy in Cairo and the headquarters in Jerusalem,” the ministry said.