An Eritrean migrant, shot by a security guard and kicked by an angry Israeli crowd that mistook him for a gunman, was identified yesterday as one of the dead from an attack on a bus station in Beersheba.
The Eritrean agricultural worker was named by his employer as Mila Abtum. In what some Israeli media described as a lynching, captured on amateur video on Sunday, the attack on Mr Abtum underscored a mounting sense of panic and anger over a wave of Palestinian attacks that shows no sign of abating.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose right-wing government has deployed soldiers to reinforce municipal police and encouraged Israeli civilians with gun licences to go about armed, warned against vigilantism.
The almost three weeks of violence has killed 41 Palestinians, including assailants and demonstrators at anti-Israeli protests, eight Israelis and now one Eritrean. It was set off in part by Palestinians’ anger over what they see as increased Jewish encroachment on Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque complex.
Mr Netanyahu has said he seeks no change to the decades-old status quo in which Israel bans Jewish prayer at the al-Aqsa site in the walled Old City of East Jerusalem, captured along with the West Bank in a 1967 war. He says religious incitement, speeded by social media, has fuelled the bloodshed.
“What we see here is a combination of extremist Islam and the Internet,” he said at the Likud party meeting. In a bid to stem the most serious Palestinian attacks on its streets since an uprising a decade ago, Israel has poured hundreds of troops into its cities and set up roadblocks in Palestinian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem. In Gaza, Fathy Hamad, a Hamas leader, praised Palestinians who carried out attacks. “This intifada [uprising] will not stop, this Jihad will not stop,” he said at a public ceremony.
You should use booby-traps and explosive devices in adding to cars and stabbings to hit Israelis
The Islamic State militant group released a video urging: “Jihad should not be a reaction that may soon fade away. You should use explosive devices and booby-traps in addition to hitting Israelis with cars and stabbing,” one fighter said.
In the most recent incident, an attacker who police said was a Bedouin citizen of Israel entered the heavily-guarded station armed with a pistol on Sunday and shot dead a soldier before snatching his rifle and opening fire on the crowd, wounding nine people.
Police shot the assailant dead, and reported there had been a second gunman. Yesterday, they said there had been no other attacker and an investigation was opened into the Eritrean man’s death. Amateur video showed a security guard shooting the Eritrean. Lying on the ground bleeding, and with armed police surrounding him in an apparent effort to protect him, he was kicked in the head several times by people who slipped through the loose cordon.
Nitza Neuman-Heiman, Deputy Director General of Soroka Medical Centre, said the Eritrean died of gunshot wounds and the injuries he sustained from the kicks.
Sagi Malachi, his employer, described Mr Abtum as a quiet, modest man who had travelled to Beersheba to renew his visa.
“The country is in a state of chaos. Civilians are confused, people are taking the law into their own hands,” Mr Malachi said on the radio.
Israeli police erected a 10-metre long concrete barrier on Sunday on a street that borders the East Jerusalem Palestinian neighourhood of Jabel Mukabar and an adjacent Jewish neighbourhood, calling it a temporary precaution to prevent rocks and petrol bombs from being thrown at the Jewish dwellings.
But it caused outrage at a meeting of Mr Netanyahu’s security Cabinet on Sunday, political officials said, because it was seen as essentially dividing Jerusalem. Israel considers all of Jerusalem, including the eastern part that it annexed after the 1967 conflict, as its “indivisible and eternal capital”, a status not recognised abroad. Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a state they seek to establish in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.