A Jewish teen who stabbed four Arab men in Dimona in a suspected “revenge attack” Friday was arrested and ordered kept in custody for six days.
The attacker, aged 17, was also ordered sent for a psychiatric examination.
Under questioning, the attacker told police he was driven by his belief that “all Arabs are terrorists,” police said, bolstering their assertion that it was a nationalist crime.
The attacks began around 9 a.m., when police received calls about an Arab man found stabbed on the street. Police swarmed to the scene and began combing the area for the attacker. In the meantime, they received a report of three additional attacks, two of whose victims managed to make it to a local police station to seek help.
Two of the victims were lightly hurt and two moderately wounded, Magen David Adom paramedics said.
Abdullah Salaman al-Mahdi, 20, was the victim of the first stabbing on Gadolei Yisrael Street. His brother, Youssef, accused the city of Dimona of negligence.
“If the assailant were an Arab, an officer would have shot him and received an honor,” al-Mahdi said Friday. “My brother was not a criminal and was working hard to save money for school.
Stabbing him in the back while he performed his job is a crime.”
The second incident, in which three men were stabbed, took place around an hour later on Ben-Gurion Avenue. The wounded included two Palestinian laborers and one Arab Israeli.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strongly condemned the attack on Friday. “Israel is a state of law and order,” he said, pledging to “bring justice to anyone using violence and breaking the law from any side.”
The attack in Dimona followed an attempted lynching of three Arab men in Netanya on Thursday night by Jewish men.
Two victims managed to escape unharmed; one sustained injuries and was saved by police.
On Friday night, Sharon subdistrict police said that they had arrested five suspects involved in the incident, which they referred to as “a brawl.” All of them are Jewish residents of the city, aged around 19 and 20, according to police.
Netanya Mayor Miriam Feirberg on Friday condemned the locals who attacked Arabs in the city the night before, and vowed that Netanya “won’t let a fringe group of lawbreakers harm the delicate relations between Jews and non-Jews in the city.”