It was mid-day in a quiet Petach Tikva neighborhood on June 27th, when a man hopped off a scooter next to a kindergarten, ran down the street and shot two men dead before racing back to the scooter and disappearing into the city. Underworld figure Eli Orkabi, 35, lay dead on the pavement next to local contractor Eran Fartush, 42, who it appears was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time – in this instance a quiet suburban neighborhood …
After four years heading the police intelligence and investigations branch (“AHAM”), Maj Gen Yoav Segalovitz was the one being questioned Thursday, and it appeared he’d learned something from the countless suspects he’d interrogated over the years. Calmly evasive and quietly dismissive of questions, he was not a hostile witness, just a man showing an impressive ability to speak for 45 minutes without saying almost anything of substance. Towards the end of the press conference, one crime reporter from an Israeli paper …
Despite a series of unqualified statements and inflammatory, racist language directed towards African migrants, (called simply “infiltrators” – a word typically only used in Jpost articles when quoting official statements by politicians or protestors), a June 8 article by prominent Israeli journalist and commentator Ben Caspit entitled “South Tel Aviv: Abandoned by the State” didn’t make the sort of online stir I thought it would. On January 17, the African Refugee Development Center issued a press release criticizing the article, posted …
When the full details of the Bar Noar case are cleared for publication, probably sooner rather than later, it will be one of the strangest and most lurid crime cases written in Israel in years. Surprising and terribly tragic, the current police case against the three main suspects and an LGBT activist involved in the story runs counter, though maybe not entirely, to what many assumed was a hate crime against the community. In the almost four years since Nir Katz, …
Minutes after reports that shots were fired in a small Beersheba bank branch on Monday, wide swaths of the Israeli media had already ID’d the suspects: two young men from Rahat, a Beduin city of around 50,000 people, some 15 miles outside of town. Within a half hour or so, a southern district police spokesman stated that the shooter was a resident of the city, a 40-year-old Jewish man, and that he apparently acted alone. As the day progressed, a picture …
“Tell me, do the Israelis still care about the Alperons? They’re nobodies now, nobody thinks of them anymore,”, the courtroom security guard with a large white knit kippa said to a row of photographers in a corridor at the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court last Friday morning. Downstairs, mob princes Dror and Omer Alperon and a friend of theirs named Daniel Gedidian waited to be brought in for their remand extension on charges of attacking detectives who came to their Herzliya home …
A young Israeli man lurked after a teenage girl walking home in the Yemenite Quarter close to midnight Saturday. As the girl made her way up the stairwell of her apartment building on Hakovshim street the man pounced on her and a struggle ensued. The woman began to scream, awakening her mother, who came to the stairwell, causing the would-be rapist to flee into the night, police said. Speaking to a Tel Aviv police spokesman about an entirely different subject Sunday …
This could have been a scene straight out of North Korea, or at least that’s what a few of the crime reporters present said. What should have been an event to honor Tel Aviv’s cops had become a love-in for Israel Police Commissioner Yohanan Danino. Before Israel’s top cop took to the podium, three cherubic little children clad in Tel Aviv Police t-shirts beamed towards the crowd of some 300 uniformed police. “Who’s the most handsome cop? The commissioner!” one child …
The Pyongyang District Police and the Tel Aviv press walkout Read More »
“You see that guy, something’s wrong with that guy,” said “Ronen” a detective from the Lev Tel Aviv police station during a ride-around I went on for a couple hours last week as part of a story on the strangely legal and highly potent drugs sold at Tel Aviv kiosks. “Why? Is it the hat?” I asked, savoring the rare opportunity to be on the other end of the police gaze. “No, it’s how he’s walking. He’s walking but not going …
Not quite friends – riding around with Tel Aviv police detectives Read More »
A rat the size of a well-fed house cat sent a female reporter from Army Radio dashing across Fein Street one night earlier this week in the heart of the Central Bus Station neighborhood, Tel Aviv’s basin of junkies, homeless African migrants, and bottom-rung prostitutes. The brush with the rodent was one of the few moments of excitement during a tour organized by police for crime reporters, all of whom have been to the area time and time again. The …