Police accused of failing to investigate beach attack on Arab Israeli man

Police were accused on Sunday of failing to investigate a suspected hate attack last week on an Arab Israeli man who had his back slashed with a knife during an altercation on a beach, only coming to interview him after a lawmaker intervened.

Muhammad Nasasrah, 21, from the central town of Lod was rushed to the hospital Thursday for treatment after the incident. Police took his number but he says he did not hear from them again until midnight Saturday, after Joint List lawmaker Ahmad Tibi posted about the incident.

Nasasrah, a student at Beit Berl College, was on the 4×4 beach in Rishon Lezion after work with a friend of his when he was allegedly attacked by several Jewish Israelis after they heard the two speaking Arabic, Nasasrah said in an interview with the Arab Israeli news site Arab48.

The attackers sliced open the length of his back, requiring dozens of stitches.

According to Nasasrah, the men first asked him if he had a nargilah water pipe. When he refused and turned around, they attacked, he said. “They attacked us because we were Arab. Because we spoke Arabic. They weren’t drunk or high, they were totally in their right minds, a whole group of them,” he said.

Despite the attack, police did not reach out to Nasasrah, until Tibi posted a graphic picture of his wound and asked why officers were ignoring the attack

https://twitter.com/Ahmad_tibi/status/1269341974538194946

“A policeman took his ID number before he was taken to the hospital, but not a single policeman has come to the hospital to investigate! How can this be?” Tibi wrote on Twitter.

A policeman got in touch with him at midnight on the following night, three days after the first policemen took down his information at the scene of the crime, Nasasrah said, claiming that if a Jew had been knifed by an Arab, the police reaction would have been very different.

“I’m a working guy, I love this country, I believe in this country,” Nasasrah told Channel 13. But at the same time, he said, he thought that if the situation were reversed, the police would have acted much sooner.

“The police knew about the incident ever since it happened, and they didn’t come to meet me. What is that if not racism?” Nasasrah asked.

The Israel Police did not respond immediately to a request for comment from the Times of Israel asking if they had managed to confirm any aspects of Nasasrah’s story, or if they were investigating the incident as a hate crime.

اللد | إعتداء عنصري على الشاب محمد نصاصرة في شاطئ ريشون لتسيون https://t.co/gxmLuWap0Y pic.twitter.com/c5UCzuHWPU

— ramlaonline (@ramlaonline) June 7, 2020

In a statement to Channel 13, police denied that there had been any delay in embarking on the investigation into the incident.

“Contrary to what is being claimed, many actions were undertaken and are currently being undertaken, such as gathering testimonies and evidence,” police said.

The incident is not the only allegation of alleged police misconduct toward Arab citizens of Israel in recent days. Bilal al-A’asam, a resident of Tel al-Sabi, told Ynet that he was taken and beaten by police last Wednesday for several hours before they told him that it had been a case of mistaken identity.

According to police, al-A’sam fled from officers who were investigating his house for drugs and was released on bail, Ynet reported.