Man detained for attacking guard at Beersheba hospital

Police on Saturday detained a man who attacked a guard at Beersheba’s Soroka hospital in southern Israel, officials said, marking another incident in a spate of recent attacks on health workers.

Hebrew media said 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.

It was not immediately clear if the guard was injured and no reason was given for the dispute.

“We vehemently condemn any form of violence directed at hospital staff and we are working with determination to combat this phenomena,” Soroka said in a statement.

There have been a number of recent attacks on health workers, and earlier in the week 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.

Eran Talor, chair of the Israel Association for Emergency Medicine, wrote to Health Minister Yaakov Litzman and Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan urging them to act because existing security staff do not have sufficient authority to tackle the issue.

Talor’s letter came after two attacks within the span of three days at the Ichilov Hospital ER department in Tel Aviv. In one incident security guards trying to protect staff were beaten and suffered minor to moderate injuries.

A man was arrested last Saturday for attacking a nurse in Ichilov because he felt he was not being given adequate treatment for injuries he suffered in a traffic accident, police said. Last week a group of five men injured security guards at the same medical center when they tried to assault staff in the ER unit because a family member had complained about the service she received.

Last month a woman hospitalized at Haifa’s Rambam Medical Center beat a nurse unconscious and inflicted injuries that required medical treatment. The assailant was arrested.

In March a Holocaust survivor burned a nurse at a Holon clinic to death. According to the court indictment, Asher Faraj became angry after the flu shot he received from the nurse made him feel weak and unwell. Faraj told police he didn’t intend to harm anyone, but merely to cause damage to property at the clinic.