Injured palm; Photo credit: Honenu
Tuesday, January 21, 2020, 10:52 On Shabbat evening, Friday, January 17, Arab construction workers assaulted and injured a pedestrian after he commented to them that they were endangering passers-by on the street by carelessly discarding construction waste. The workers responded by hurling a bottle filled with pieces of metal at him, which cut his palm. Honenu Attorney Chayim Bleicher, who is representing the Bat Yam resident, sent a letter to the Ayalon Tel Aviv Police, demanding that the incident be investigated.
The pedestrian is a recently released soldier and Bat Yam resident, aged 22, married and the father of a baby girl. He described what happened as he was walking past the Bat Yam Mall with his friends: “Suddenly we saw construction workers renovating a building and throwing cinder blocks and floor tiles directly into the street, not into the waste chute as they are supposed to, and it was simply dangerous.”
He called out to the workers that they were endangering the passers-by and asked them to stop. In response they shouted “Stinking Jew,” and, “They started to shout at us and also hurled a bottle filled with various pieces of metal at us. When I tried to figure out exactly what they had thrown, my hand got cut. They were working on Shabbat. I don’t know who the contractor was that authorized it, but they were a danger to the public,” he described.
After Shabbat, the Bat Yam resident filed a complaint about the assault. At the time of this posting it is not known whether or not any steps have been taken on the matter. Bleicher: “This was a serious incident which endangered passers-by and an assault motivated by antisemitism.”
The letter concludes with a demand from Bleicher that the police “investigate the complaint as high priority, gather video recordings from security cameras in the area, investigate all of the workers after detaining them simultaneously so that they cannot coordinate testimonies, and also investigate the workers employer.”
Honenu Attorney Chayim Bleicher added: “We expect the police to treat this incident seriously as a dangerous, antisemitic assault, and to quickly arrest the assailants before they repeat their aggressive acts.”