Police minister says Reuven Schmerling murder is apparently terror

Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan said Sunday that while it is still too early to say for sure, the murder of a 70-year-old Jewish man on Wednesday in the Israeli Arab city of Kafr Qassem appears to have been nationalistically motivated and will likely be defined as a terror attack.

Erdan, who has faced past accusations of jumping the gun on police investigations into security incidents without providing evidence, told Israel Radio that authorities are still looking into the motives behind the murder of Reuven Schmerling but that according to his “personal assessment,” it seems likely to have been a terror attack.

“We can’t say that it’s nationalistically motivated every time that a Jew is killed by a Palestinian. We can’t make up the evidence,” the minister said in a lengthy defense of police hesitation to define the attack as terrorism. “I understand how important it is for a family to have that recognition, but that decision has consequences for years ahead and we have to wait for official confirmation based on the investigation.”

But Erdan added: “I agree with the thesis that says that, generally, when there a disagreement over money the normal way it is resolved is by a lawsuit or maybe a bit of violence, but when it’s a murder or a brutal murder, it is apparently because the victim is Jewish and the perpetrator is Palestinian.”

A court imposed a gag order on the details of the investigation hours after Schmerling, from the Israeli settlement of Elkana in the West Bank, was found in a storage unit in Kafr Qassem’s industrial area on Wednesday, hours before the start of the Jewish festival of Sukkot.

Police and the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, opened a joint investigation into the murder, looking at possible motives including a work- or money-related dispute. Schmerling owned a coal business in Kafr Qassem, employed residents of the city and had business contacts there.

Two Israeli TV stations reported on Saturday that new developments in the case suggested Schmerling was killed for nationalistic reasons, meaning the father of four may have been murdered because he was Jewish and/or Israeli.

Pushed as to what he felt the motive was behind the attack, Erdan said it appeared to have been terrorism.

“Due to a gag order I cannot provide any details, but I will say that, in line with the reports yesterday of official assessments that it was nationalistically motivated, I agree with those assessments,” he said.

Schmerling’s family has maintained that he was the victim of a terror attack since his body was discovered by one of his sons covered in stab wounds. Some reports in the Hebrew media suggested he had also been beaten.

He was to celebrate his 70th birthday on Thursday as his children and grandchildren gathered in Elkana for the occasion.

In May, Erdan faced criticism after telling visiting US President Donald Trump that an incident in which several people were injured in Tel Aviv shortly before the president arrived in Israel may have been a terror attack, despite police having told the media an hour earlier that it was a car accident. It was later reported that Erdan had not been updated because ministers had their cellphones taken from them when they underwent security screening ahead of the airport welcoming ceremony.

In February, Erdan was forced to backtrack on his insistence that jihadist-inspired terror was behind a controversial incident in a Bedouin village in which a local man was shot dead by police as his car rammed and killed an officer.

In a statement, Erdan — who, in the aftermath of the January 18 incident, asserted that Yaqoub Mousa Abu Al-Qia’an was a terrorist inspired by the Islamic State group — admitted it was “possible” he was mistaken.

The minister came under fire from fellow lawmakers and others after a Justice Ministry probe reportedly found that Abu Al-Qia’an was not a terrorist, but was shot by mistake in the chaos of a pre-dawn operation to raze homes in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran.

Erdan was also criticized for seeming to overplay the number of blazes set during a rash of fires last year as having been set by nationally motivated arsonists. Despite claims by Erdan as well as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the hundreds of blazes were deliberate terrorism, only a handful of people have been charged with such motives in connection with starting a small number of fires.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.