Lod, Israel: Chaos erupted in Israeli cities with mixed Jewish-Arab populations, marking an escalation in the country’s worst communal violence in two decades.
As bands of Jewish and Arab citizens fought one another and police in towns across Israel for a third night early on Thursday (Friday AEST), Israelis worried that the battle inside the country may be harder to stop than the air war still being waged with Gaza.
Jewish right-wing demonstrator holds a rock as he stand by Israeli paramilitary border police during clashes between Arabs, police and Jews, in the mixed town of Lod, central Israel.Credit:AP
The Israeli media and local residents alike have warned about the threat of civil war in the country, even as Israel and Hamas have been engaged in the most intense exchange of rockets and bombs since the 2014 Gaza war.
In some cases, Arab Israelis protesting in support of Palestinians in Gaza and Jerusalem have squared off against right-wing Jewish Israelis and police, and these confrontations have sparked riots and looting.
In other cases, groups of vigilante Jews have marched through Arab areas, targeting shops and individuals with violence. And in yet other cases, Arabs have attacked Jews passing through Arab neighbourhoods.
Smoke rises following Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City.Credit:AP
1750 rockets so far
Palestinian militants fired more rockets into Israel’s commercial heartland on Thursday as Israel kept up a punishing bombing campaign in Gaza and massed tanks and troops on the enclave’s border.
So far some 1750 rockets have been fired at Israel, of which 300 fell short in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military claimed.
The four days of cross-border fighting showed no sign of abating and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the campaign “will take more time”.
Worried that the region’s worst hostilities in years could spiral out of control, the United States is sending an envoy, Hady Amr. Truce efforts by Egypt, Qatar and the United Nations have so far offered no sign of progress.
Vehicles on fire in Israel in Lod.Credit:Israeli police/twitter
US President Joe Biden called on Thursday for a de-escalation of the violence, saying he wants to see a significant reduction in rocket attacks.
Militants fired rocket salvoes at Tel Aviv and surrounding towns, Israel’s commercial heartland, with the Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepting many of them. Communities near the Gaza border and the southern desert city of Beersheba were also targeted.
Five Israelis were wounded by a rocket that hit a building near Tel Aviv.
Israeli warplanes struck a six-storey residential building in Gaza that it said belonged to Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Palestinian enclave.
Netanyahu said Israel has struck a total of close to 1000 militant targets in the territory.
Israeli aircraft also attacked a Hamas intelligence headquarters and four apartments belonging to senior commanders from the group, the military said, adding that the homes were used for planning and directing strikes on Israel.
Violence in the streets
Video shot in the central Israeli town of Bat Yam showed Jewish nationalists pulling a man, whom they believed to be Arab, from a car and brutally beating him on the street. The Israeli media described the incident as “an attempted lynching in prime time.”
The man was admitted to a Tel Aviv hospital with serious injuries, according to the Associated Press.
Smoke rises from the rubble of Al-Shorouk Tower following an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City.Credit:Getty
At least 103 people have been killed in Gaza, including 27 children, over the past four days, Palestinian medical officials said. On Thursday alone, 49 Palestinians were killed in the enclave, the highest single-day figure since Monday.
Seven other residents of Israel, including a teenager and a young boy, also have been killed, the Israeli Army said Thursday morning.
But Arab citizens of Israel also blame the unrest on police for essentially yielding their towns to right-wing Israeli mobs. Israeli nationalists say they are mobilising because their Jewish communities feel unsafe. Both sides accuse the police of not protecting them.
Israeli Public Security Minister Amir Ohana defended those “law-abiding citizens” who carry weapons to assist the police. Arab Israelis said this amounted to an incitement of violence against them.
Bus and carloads of nationalist Jews have descended on Lod, a city in central Israel with a mixed population, Israeli media reported. Many of them are young settlers from the occupied West Bank and have been organised over WhatsApp.
On Wednesday, they marched through Arab areas of the city, waving Israeli flags and some armed with guns, in defiance of a state of emergency declared earlier by the Israeli government.
“We are in such a state of anarchy,” said Nati Ron, who said he came to Lod on Wednesday night to defend its Jewish residents “from a pogrom” because he said the police would not.
As the night progressed, police were largely out of sight. Arab residents set up their own street defences, also defying the 8pm curfew.
‘Arab, Arab’
Drivers and passengers entering these neighbourhoods shouted “Arab, Arab” to confirm they belonged, and some of the residents inspected the cars to make sure they were not transporting undercover Israeli police. Bands of Arab children and teenagers donned black disposable face masks to shield themselves from police surveillance, they said.
For decades, Lod has been a working-class city of Jews and Arabs. In recent years, religious nationalist Jews have moved into the city next to Arab areas.
In Haifa, a city often considered Israel’s model for coexistence, social media messages warned Arab residents not to go outside or to answer their doors, following reports that Jewish nationalists were keeping tabs on which homes were Arab-owned.
An Israeli police officer inspects the damaged car of an Israeli Arab man who was attacked and injured by an Israeli Jewish mob in Bat Yam, Israel.Credit:Getty
Reports of looting, arson and vigilante mobs elsewhere, in cities such as Tamra, Tiberias and Ramle, were shared through WhatsApp groups and social media posts.
Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said that more than 400 people were arrested on Wednesday “for attacking police officers and involved in major incidents” in the cities of Acre, Kassem, Kfar, Lod, Ramle and Tamra, and around Rahat in the Negev desert.
He said several shootings occurred in Lod, where two Jewish civilians and one policeman were shot, the latter moderately injured. On Thursday morning, an Israeli man was stabbed in the city, Rosenfeld said.
Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz on Wednesday called up more reserves of the Border Police, who typically patrol in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
A video tweeted by the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation, showed Jews and Israeli Arabs throwing stones at each other in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem.
Border police had already been deployed in Lod, after an Arab man was killed in communal violence that erupted there earlier in the week.
“We are seeing the fracturing of our social compact,” Israeli commentator Nadav Eyal wrote on the front page of Yediot Ahronoth.
“The cowardice of the Arab public leaders who whipped up a frenzy and then fled. The cowardice of the cabinet ministers who saw the development of La Familia’s racist gangs occur right in front of them, but after the turn of events in Lod yesterday, were afraid to say anything,” he said referring to a notorious group of right-wing Israeli soccer hooligans.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with Israeli border police in Lod, near Tel Aviv.Credit:AP
Netanyahu condemned the night’s violence, calling it “intolerable.”
But Netanyahu’s critics say that by aligning with far-right nationalist parties, he has personally stoked the unrest.
“Netanyahu is burning all of us, Arab and Jews, only to stay as prime minister,” said Maisam Jaljuli, a political activist from Tira, an Arab city in central Israel.
“This government is working for a long, long time to separate the two communities from each other,” she added.
Jaljuli said she was deeply afraid watching violence tear apart the idea of a “shared society” in the country.
“It seems like everything we worked for is collapsing right now,” she said. “People have no tolerance for each other. Everyone wants revenge from the other side.”
Washington Post, Reuters
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