A newspaper distributor was attacked in a residential building in Ashdod (Israel Police)
Saturday night, a little over seven months ago.
The phone is ringing.
On the line M, our close and beloved friend.
What's up, I asked.
Very bad, he answered me in a tone I'm not used to hearing from him, we were lynched.
lynch'?
I asked.
What happened to you?
where are you?
In Netanya, he answered in a broken voice.
We were in hospital until midnight.
A. with a broken face.
I also have a broken jaw and facial injuries, the little children are terribly traumatized.
I decided to deviate from the routine of the topics I usually write about in this column, because this story gives me no rest.
M. and his wife are good friends of ours for half a year.
We used to live in the same building in the kibbutz.
Since then, we have bonded with them and they have built us, together in joy and sadness.
M., 49, father of six children, is one of the best people out there, the kind you pray will always be by your side.
He has a successful store, and in addition to managing it, he volunteers at MDA as an ambulance driver.
Orian Banyan, the soldier who was attacked in Ramat Aviv on Tuesday by a group of boys (photo: official website, public relations)
He was a co-founder of a humanitarian organization with which he goes everywhere in the world to help deal with natural disasters, he flew to Africa - all at the expense of his free time and without receiving a penny - to guide third world countries in dealing with emergency situations.
He is active in an association that establishes warm homes for lone soldiers.
He deals with various kinds of help for welfare families, and regardless of all this - he is an officer with the rank of major who gives the country 100-120 reserve days a year, some of them abroad. I tell all this to make it clear that this is a guy who is all giving and good, the man who is the furthest in the world from fights , from violence, profanity or raising a hand at someone.
If you follow the news, you know that M's story is the story of too many Israelis.
Innocent people who did no harm to anyone, who found themselves victims of severe violence, who pay a heavy physical and mental price, and who wish for a law enforcement system that would restore sanity and peace to the street.
I have no idea what the plans of the new minister of national security are.
I do know that without more determined police, without faster investigations, and without more severe punishment, nothing will change here.
And the situation in which a citizen who goes out into the street cannot be convinced that he will return home safe, should be more urgent than any other issue that is placed before Minister Itamar Ben Gabir and his office.
This week, after I interviewed on the radio the sister of the soldier who was attacked in Ramat Aviv 3 by a group of boys who sprayed him with tear gas, electrocuted him with a stun gun, and then made a cut in his head with a Japanese knife, I called M and offered him to talk.
restore what happened to him.
Share the physical and mental price the family pays.
describe the lazy conduct of the police.
To tell how he felt when the police decided to question him as a suspect.
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the lynching
"It was on Friday at noon," he began.
"I was with the children at the beach. Then we went to my parents in Netanya to say Shabbat Shalom, and from there we were supposed to go to Herzliya to spend Shabbat with my brother-in-law."
M. was driving the car, with his son sitting next to him - a fighter in an elite unit, in civilian clothes, with his IDF micro-tavor type weapon on him - and behind him were his two small children, one 7 years old, the other 12 years old. "I arrived at the main street.
It is a road with two and a half or three lanes.
The left lane is used for parking, and at the same time - one of the cars parked in it - there was a vehicle parked in a double parking lot, with its door open and blocking the only available lane.
Since it was impossible to pass, I stopped and waited something like a minute and a half for him to finish organizing himself and close the door.
I thought maybe he was tying a kid in there or something.
"Meanwhile, more cars stopped behind me, and several of them started honking. The guy closed the door. I started moving forward slowly, and then just as I was parallel to him, he came to open the door again. Since I had an open window, I told him 'be careful, be careful' , that he won't open the door for me. Then he raises his head, approaches me, and says to me, 'Aren't you too bad? You have small children.' It was a punch from a man training. Seven months after that, I still have vision problems from that blow, and hearing loss. I was shocked. My glasses flew off."
"Meanwhile, my son jumped out of the vehicle to try to help me, and within a second, as he opened the door, he was suddenly attacked by some 7 or 8 guys who came out of the nearby cafe, probably friends of the guy who started everything, and started beating him. And I try to go outside, and the guy next to me grabs my door from the outside and won't let me open it, and in the process he keeps punching me. I managed to take off the seat belt, pulled the handbrake, somehow tried to grab his hand, and then another friend of his came, who also joined With spitting and with fists."
Attack in Lod following a car accident (photo: official website, use according to Section 27 A of the Copyright Law)
"And in the midst of all this mess, I manage to see A from the other side when everyone is on him. I put it in gear, moved a little forward, and managed to open the door and get out. Someone from the gang there tried to open the back door, but luckily the two small children, who were scared as hell, locked the The inside of the car. Then the older one told me that he was protecting the little one, because he didn't know what would happen. As I get out of the car, and you see it in the videos that the neighbors took and that later came to me, 7 or 8 young people jump on me, knock me to the pavement and continue to give I have fists"
"There was someone there with a helmet, probably a man who happened to pass by, who tried to protect me. And I'm quite blurry, both from the blows and because I've been without glasses since the first punch. But I manage to see in the second crowd, the one around A, that two grab him from behind and try to grab his weapon. I jumped in his direction, and hugged him tightly with the weapon, as they pulled it towards him. Someone had his weapon in his hand, with the belt still on A's neck - and they are trying to take it from him. One grabs him from behind, two blast him in the face , and one actually pulls the weapon. The weapon was no longer attached to him. It was in the air. It was only tied to him with the strap."
"At some point, in the midst of all this, I suddenly felt a strong knee that someone put into my pelvis from behind. Later, in a hospital, we diagnosed a crack there. I don't know what happened, but in one moment everything was over and everyone was gone. I don't know how long it all took. According to the video it was something like three minutes. To me it seemed much longer, but I can't really estimate. I was sure we were done there. We weren't getting out of there alive. Think one hit from everything we took there, in the wrong place, and I could have died Or end up disabled, heaven forbid. There were two of us there against something like 15. You can see them very well in the videos. And I'm talking to you about an event that is taking place in Independence Square in Netanya. The center of the center of the city."
the price
"This whole business ended close to the beginning of Shabbat. A policeman who came to the scene took a complaint from us for five minutes about what happened, and we drove to Herzliya, where the rest of the family was. It was very important to me to try to get the little children out of this nightmare as quickly as possible"
"Beyond the pain in the whole body , A's nose didn't stop bleeding. He ran out of tissue packs with blood. When we saw that it didn't stop, we went to the hospital. We were there almost the whole night. It took the doctors 8 hours to stop the blood that was leaking from the boy's nose. A came out of this incident with A dislocated lower jaw, with a deep cut in his cheek and with broken nasal passages. He will have to have surgery to fix it. He has trouble sleeping and breathing. Everything is moving in there inside him. That's apart from the big mental trauma. He was beaten all over his body, in his ribs And especially in the face. They just held him and blew his face."
Assaulting a driver in Ayalon (photo: official website, Walla system!)
"My jaw was broken, I lost 40 percent of the hearing in my left ear, I have a crack in my pelvis, two teeth were broken, two toes were broken, and I have visual impairment in my left eye, like a curtain that I feel mostly in the hours of darkness. And we haven't even gotten to the little ones who screamed hysterically At first I tried to tell them, 'Look, they attacked us, but we won.' Your strong one gets beaten like that. Listen, it could have ended in irreparable things. If I had gotten the chair there from the cafe on my head, I could have ended this event with a severe disability. Look in the video, I am being beaten there around the tables and chairs of the restaurant. It would be enough for someone to drop another blow on my head with something, and I don't want to think how it would have ended. I look at the news about such events, like in a parking lot in Herzliya, like in the Ayalon streets, in Ramat Aviv itself, and I'm horrified."
As mentioned, more than seven months have passed since then.
M's children, who witnessed the lynching, are being treated by a psychologist.
"They have symptoms that didn't exist before. They cry a lot. They come to sleep in bed with us a lot. This was not the case before. We are all in treatment. And you should know that those who do not have money cannot deal with it alone. Everything is private. The HMO does not finance Not even the state, because it's not a terrorist attack. Not even the insurance company, because it's not a car accident. You're falling through the cracks. A sea of money. If you don't have a deep pocket, and if I didn't have my reserve unit that helped wholeheartedly, you don't can handle it alone."
the police
M. gave, as mentioned, his first brief testimony in the field as part of a complaint he submitted to the policeman who arrived at the scene.
Two days later, on his own initiative, he went to the police station where he lived - both to add more details, and so that his son could attach his own complaint.
"Every few weeks I would call the Netanya police to try to find out what was going on with it, and I couldn't get any information. After about two months, I was able to reach the station commander, who gave me the phone number of the investigator in charge of the case. I started calling him and each time they told me he would call back to me, and that the case is under investigation and that they update me when there is something new.
"At the same time, I was conducting an investigation myself. My mother started sending me videos that people had taken and sent in the neighborhood's WhatsApp groups. You can see everyone involved there. I went with these videos from store to store and from restaurant to restaurant and asked if anyone knew these people, who are seen in the photos attacking me. I gave The police have two names, along with their phone numbers. I also gave the details of a neighbor who contacted me immediately after the incident and told me that she saw everything from beginning to end. This week I called her and it turned out that they only called her at the end of November, five and a half months after the incident."
"There was another neighbor who lived above the scene of the incident and saw everything, but she told me that she was afraid to testify. She told me, 'These are crazy, criminals, they might come up to me some night. I'm afraid for my life.' She saw everything from her window. She She went downstairs as it all ended and said to me, 'It's crazy, I don't know how you live at all'. An elderly woman. I asked her to testify. She told me, 'No, no, I'm scared. I just came down to see that you're all right.'"
If this story doesn't sound crazy enough to you by now, its final phase, at least for now, came a few weeks ago.
"They called me from the Netanya police and told me that they wanted to complete an investigation. I was disappointed. I finally hear that they are investigating. You see, I have not been contacted since the incident. I arrive at the station and the investigator tells me, 'We need to interrogate you with a warning.' I thought I couldn't hear well She says, 'Since in the video we see you being beaten, we need to check. Maybe it was you who started it all.' , in one moment I realize that I am the suspect at all.
"I felt humiliated. I was in uniform. I came especially from reserves in the north. I told them, 'If this is the way things are going, we are in a bad place. A real bad place.' All the familiar text of the investigator - 'You are suspected of assault', 'You may consult a lawyer' and all that. And I ask the investigator 'Where did you come up with this anyway? How in this whole story am I the attacker?'. And they show me a video of the incident and tell me They see you being beaten. Here you raise your hand.' I tell them, 'Look at the video what happens half a second before. I raise my hands to defend myself, otherwise I die.' In the end they told me that in their opinion they might not have interrogated me, but they had to.
"At a certain point they suddenly ask me, 'Why are you talking about stealing a weapon? There was no weapon there at all'. I ask them, 'Are you serious? My son was there with his IDF weapon.'
Look at the videos for yourself.
In short, I had the feeling that something in this investigation was screwed up.
And I gave the police all the credit at first.
I remember that when I came to submit the complaint, I told the investigator that there were journalists who wanted to report on this, to get the story out.
He told me, 'Do what you want, but keep in mind that it could harm the investigation.'
I told myself 'I work by the book.
If it harms the investigation, I remain silent and I trust the police to do their job.'
I have no idea where this investigation stands.
I am not updated on anything.
I don't know who they investigated, if they did.
It's an incident that happened in June and until now they haven't shared anything with me."
This week I checked for M where the case is.
Instead of the police informing him, I informed him that the investigation was over and the case was transferred to the decision of the claims unit of the Israel Police, so that they could decide what to do with it.
How many suspects are there?
The police chose not to answer this question.
And a final word, for the benefit of those who seek an illustration of the severity of the situation.
The suspects of the severe violence were not arrested for a moment, and they are still walking around freely.
M. and his family asked me to appear in this column anonymously.
they are afraid
And that's the whole story on one leg.
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