Tel Aviv man indicted for threatening LGBTQ community, transgender women’s center

A Tel Aviv man was charged Thursday with threatening to kill members of the LGBTQ community and to attack a center for transgender women.

According to the indictment, 45-year-old Elran Rahmani was motivated by hatred toward the LGBTQ community.

Rahmani called the center for transgender women in Tel Aviv at the end of last month and, using a slur, asked for the address, saying he wanted to donate items.

When the employee who answered the phone refused to give the address, Rahmani allegedly told them: “You understand that you are helping people to cut themselves and injure themselves and mutilate themselves.”

When the employee asked Rahmani how he had heard about the center, he replied: “When I get to you, you will know, I promise you. You understand that you are going to be stabbed, right?”

As a result of the call, police opened an investigation and arrested Rahmani.

While in detention, Rahmani said on four occasions that he planned to kill gay men.

“I will kill the first gay man I see,” he told officers, also threatening to drive his car at 180 kilometers per hour to carry out a ramming attack, Channel 13 news reported.

Over the course of his interrogation, Rahmani said he believed transgender people to be “deviant,” said that “according to Jewish law, sex between men leads to the death penalty” and that “a man in a dress is not normal.”

According to Channel 13, prosecutors said that the fact Rahmani tried to find out the address of the center for transgender women showed that he had the “intention to go there in order to carry out the threat he made later in the conversation.”

Rahmani made the threats just days before Tel Aviv held its annual Pride Parade.

The indictment came amid concerns that statements against the LGBTQ community from members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline coalition may be fueling hatred.

On Tuesday, a Haredi member of the coalition, Yitzhak Pindrus of United Torah Judaism, said the LGBTQ community posed a graver threat to Israel than Islamist terror groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, and said that it was his duty to prevent Pride marches.

Likud MK Nissim Vaturi caused an outcry last month when he claimed that some parents deliberately decide to make their children gay in order to support LGBTQ values, including by giving their sons dolls to play with.

Vaturi made the statement while defending the government’s decision to grant far-right MK Avi Maoz — who holds anti-LGBTQ, anti-pluralist, and anti-feminist views — the authority to exercise oversight over educational vendors in public schools.

In a recording broadcast in January and apparently made last year, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said he was confident he could take active measures against the LGBTQ community without suffering any repercussions from his political base because his voters “don’t give a damn” about “the gays.”

In addition, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir was for a number of years at the forefront of protests against Pride parades.

Critics of the government’s planned judicial overhaul say it would leave the rights of minorities, including the LGBTQ community, unprotected.