Police, prosecution to join forces against attackers of seniors

Southern district commander vows ‘no plea bargains’

Southern District police chief Yoram Halevy speaks to Border Police officers in a graduation ceremony in 2012 (Nati Shohat/Flash90)
Southern District police chief Yoram Halevy speaks to Border Police officers in a graduation ceremony in 2012 (Nati Shohat/Flash90)

In the wake of a spree of attacks against senior citizens in recent weeks, the police and the State Prosecutor’s Office agreed to crack down on people who target the elderly, southern district commander Yoram Halevy announced Saturday.

“We have no plans of being lenient in such cases. We treat these incidents as murders,” said Halevy at a cultural event in Beersheba. “In these cases it is a murder of the soul.”

Halevy said the police had reached an agreement with the State Prosecutor’s Office that suspects in such cases would not be offered plea bargains and would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Halevy said that the police’s role when the elderly fall victim to violence is to collect evidence, bring the attackers to justice and place the case on high priority.

“The last part [of the process] which is not in our court, is to make sure that the penalty convicted attackers receive is severe,” Halevy said.

“We are talking about a helpless population. Harming them is an unforgivable offense,” Halevy concluded.

Minister for Senior Citizens Affairs Uri Orbach last week called on the police and the courts to adopt a zero-tolerance attitude towards violence against the elderly.

“The elderly are not punching bags for every bully,” Orbach wrote on his Facebook page, adding that “attacks against the elderly indicate the deterioration of our society.” Orbach urged the commissioner of police to crack down on such offenders and said the courts need to punish convicted attackers to the full extent of the law.

A 71-year-old man was assaulted by two men in their 20s in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, late Monday night, reportedly because he was “driving too slowly.” The man was hospitalized in Kfar Saba’s Meir Hospital after suffering a heart attack as a result of the beating. He was in stable condition.

The two attackers, aged 25 and 26, were sent to four days of house arrest by a magistrate’s court judge on Tuesday. They claimed they hadn’t attacked the man.

Last Saturday, another Herzliya resident in his late 70s was hospitalized, suffering from a broken leg and head injuries after being beaten by a 28-year-old man .

Amiram Oron was in a public park in an area designated for children when the younger man entered with his dog. According to police reports, when Oron told the man that he was not allowed to bring a dog into that section of the park, the younger man attacked him. Oron was taken by ambulance to Meir Hospital in Kfar Saba and the police arrested his alleged assailant.

A day earlier, Pavel Gertman, a 79-year-old Holocaust survivor, was assaulted in a public park in Holon by a man after Gertman asked his children to stop dismantling the park benches. The suspect, a man in his 40s, denied having punched Gertman, claiming that the two merely shoved each other.

In march, another Holocaust survivor, 84-year-old Reuven Yonah, was attacked by a group of youths in Petah Tikva.

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