Police vow crackdown on Jerusalem violence as rock throwing persists
Commissioner Yohanan Danino insists that rule of law will be enforced in the capital to maintain public security
Israel’s police chief vowed to quell unrest in East Jerusalem Wednesday by bolstering forces in the city, even as violence in the capital persisted.
Yohanan Danino said new Jerusalem District Commander Major-General Moshe Edri had a day earlier proposed to mayor Nir Barkat a significant, albeit temporary, increase in police numbers in Jerusalem.
During the day a No. 143 bus was stoned as it passed by the Shuafat neighborhood on Uzi Narkis Road, sustaining damage to its windows, the latest in a near constant stream of violent incidents in the city.
On Tuesday Danino said police would also set up a special unit to crackdown on the violence in the capital.
“I am convinced that quiet will quickly return to Jerusalem and the surrounding area, but our goal is not just quiet, but that the rule of law should also work,” Danino declared during a tour of the Shuafat neighborhood together with Edri and Barkat.
Jerusalem was being treated as a high-priority matter, Danino said.
In addition to upping manpower, police also intend to improve enforcement with technological means and by deploying more unmanned observation balloons for video surveillance.
On Tuesday police arrested three youths from Beit Hanina on suspicion that they stoned cars in the previous days. The youths, aged 14-16, were apprehended based on intelligence information, Israel Radio reported.
The capital, and the city’s light rail train system in particular, have faced disruptions as a result of vandalism and riots that have erupted sporadically since the brutal killing of 16-year-old Shuafat resident Muhammed Abu Khdeir in early July, allegedly by Jewish extremists avenging the killings of three Jewish teenagers in the West Bank a month earlier.
Stoning attacks have damaged nine of the 23 light rail trains in Jerusalem to the point that they are no longer operations, the company that operates the train system said this month.
The CityPass announcement came weeks after accusations by the CEO of the Jerusalem light rail and by a Housing Ministry official that the Jerusalem police and the ministry attempted to cover up violent incidents in East Jerusalem.