Erdan implies Umm al-Hiran ramming wasn’t an attack

Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan appears to walk back entirely his claim that an incident in a Bedouin village during which a police officer and a local resident were killed was a terror attack.

“We had a rough and regrettable incident a few weeks ago at Umm al-Hiran,” he says at a police event in Beersheba, according to Haaretz. “We must not let anyone try to take a local event, during which, sadly, both a police officer and a citizen were killed, and project from it on the relations between the Bedouin population and the Israel Police.”

The incident he is describing took place early on the morning of January 18, when police arrived to evacuate Umm al-Hiran’s Bedouin residents in order to make way for a new town.

As officers converged on the village, Yaqoub Mousa Abu Al-Qia’an, 47, a teacher and father of 12, packed a few belongings into his SUV and drove from his house, telling friends that he did not wish to witness its destruction. Soon afterward, the vehicle rammed into a group of officers, killing 1st Sgt. Erez Levi, 34, a father of two from Yavneh. Abu Al-Qia’an was fatally shot by police.

Police initially asserted that Abu Al-Qia’an was a terrorist, and even accused him of being inspired by the Islamic State group. They said he was shot after accelerating the vehicle in the direction of the officers.

But video footage that emerged in the hours after the incident showed the officers fired before Abu Al-Qia’an accelerated, and that, contrary to police assertions, the car’s lights were on.

Still, Erdan maintained for weeks that Abu Al-Qia’an was a terrorist.

Today he sounds far less assured.

“We need to draw conclusions once we find out exactly what happened there and the [Justice Ministry’s] Police Internal Investigations Department completes its investigation,” he says, according to Haaretz.

“From there we’ll continue to strengthen this relationship” between police and the Bedouins, “to bolster the police and law enforcement services against criminals who harm, more than anyone else, the dear Bedouin community with whom we wish to continue to live in peaceful coexistence in the Negev.”