Indictments for attacks on elderly up in recent yrs

Police have witnessed an increase in physical attacks on the elderly over the last three years.

By BEN HARTMAN
Aharonovitch 311 (photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski/The Jerusalem Post))
Aharonovitch 311
(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski/The Jerusalem Post))
The past three years have seen an increase in indictments for cases involving physical attacks on elderly Israelis, representatives of the Israel Police Investigations and Intelligence branch told the cabinet on Sunday morning.
The officers presented the weekly cabinet meeting with figures saying that from 2010-2012, police opened around 900 cases of attacks on elderly people, and that around 70 percent of them have resulted in indictments.
The figures were presented by police following a week in which several elderly Israelis reported being assaulted in incidents that received widespread media coverage.
These included an attack last Saturday on Feivel Gertman, a Holocaust survivor, who was beaten in a public park by a young father after Gertman reportedly scolded the man’s children for horseplay.
The next day, Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch condemned the recent acts of violence, saying “these series of attacks show that a segment of the Israeli population does not respect others, and in particular those who deserve our respect more than anyone else.”
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu also addressed the attacks at the cabinet meeting, calling such assaults “shocking.”
He said the state has a “deep obligation to the elderly in general and to Holocaust survivors in particular, first of all to their welfare and also to their security.”
“We will not tolerate this,” he said.
“We will use the full authority of the government of Israel to prevent such criminal acts and to severely punish the assailants.”Herb Keinon contributed to this report.