Police thwart nurse’s plot to assassinate Likud MK Oren Hazan

A nurse from the Arab Israeli city of Nazareth was arrested last month for plotting to assassinate Likud MK Oren Hazan, the scandal-prone lawmaker told Israeli television on Sunday.

Hazan said authorities learned that a nurse working at the Jerusalem medical center where he was hospitalized last year was planning to kill him. The plot was thwarted when the would-be killer’s mother learned of the plans and alerted the police, Hazan said.

The nurse, who was also plotting other attacks, was arrested in December.

Hazan discussed the thwarted plot on Hadashot, after a gag order on the case was lifted. He said police had beefed up security around his home in response.

Hazan, a right-wing firebrand known for frequent indecorous behavior, linked the plot to an incident in which he blocked relatives of Palestinian security prisoners from visiting their incarcerated family members in an Israeli jail.

In December 2017, Hazan boarded a bus carrying the family members as they traveled to the prison and confronted them saying: “A terrorist is a terrorist…They all deserve the same fate — to be put underground.”

“Even then, Hamas put a price on my head, and there is a lot of incitement against me in the West Bank,” he told Hadashot on Sunday. “It seems like my political activity bothers them.”

Hazan argued that the response of the suspect’s mother proves that Israel’s controversial policy of demolishing homes of Palestinian assailants does work as a deterrent against future attacks.

“It indicates that home demolitions and other punishments has an effect on family members,” he claimed.

Hazan, who entered the Knesset in the 2015 election, has become known as the enfant terrible of Israel’s parliament.

Shortly after he went into politics, a Hadashot news expose alleged that Hazan had previously run a casino in Bulgaria where hard drugs and prostitution were allowed. He sued the station’s journalist Amit Segal for libel, but the court rejected the bulk of the lawsuit.

Since then, Hazan has been temporarily banned from the Knesset multiple times over various wrongdoings. In January, the Knesset Ethics Committee handed Hazan a six-month ban on parliamentary activities, the maximum possible punishment — unprecedented in all the years of the Knesset — for a series of incidents in which he insulted fellow lawmakers.

The insults included publicly mocking a disabled colleague, telling a female MK she was too ugly to be a prostitute, and calling another wheelchair-bound MK “half a human.”

Last month, he called a Likud MK of Ethiopian descent a “token immigrant,” during a Knesset committee meeting.

Hazan’s father Yehiel Hazan lost his Knesset seat after a 2003 incident in which he was caught casting a double-vote in the plenum, and then attempting to remove a voting computer from a Knesset storage room to hide evidence of the act.