http://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/society/89509-151019-victims-of-blind-hatred
PUBLISHED
October 19th 2015
12:34pm
'Victim of blind hatred'
Israeli police to question those involved in lynch of wounded Eritrean asylum seeker at scene of terror attack
Moran Mekamel, a social worker and resident of the southern desert town of Beersheba, went on Sunday to buy a winter scarf ahead of a planned trip abroad.
On her way into one of the shops at the city's central bus station, she saw what has become a regular sight on Sunday afternoonד at the bustling depot: African asylum seekers, holding batches of documents, heading for the offices of the government ministry that holds their fate in its hands. Office hours for those seeking permits to remain in Israel or those appealing expulsion orders are held Sunday afternoons.
Mekamel knows the procedures well – she heads a student organization that does outreach work with asylum seekers.
As she stood in an accessories store nearby, she heard a loud shot. "There were three of us in the story and then a mother and child came running in an we all crouched behind the store's counter," she tells i24news.
"Then things went quiet and we stood up, but a second round of shooting started. We ran into the storeroom. We had no idea what was happening. We heard a lot of shouting. Again, there was a lull and we walked out of the storeroom, but the shooting started again and we went back in."
Long minutes later, when it was all over, Mekamel walked out of the store and saw a pool of blood. It was only after she got home and started hearing reports of the attack, in which a terrorist grabbed an automatic rifle from a soldier, killing him and wounding ten people, that she started to understand what she had heard.
The blood, as it turned out, was not that of the terrorist who was shot dead by police. It flowed out of the body of Haftom Zarhum, a 29-year-old asylum seeker from Eritrea, who had come to town to arrange his paper work at the nearby government office. Zarhum worked for a flower grower in a Gaza border community, but it wasn't a Hamas rocket that killed him.
In the confusion of the shooting attack in Beersheba, the dark-skinned Mekamel was mistaken for a terrorist and was shot by a security guard. That, says Mekamel, is understandable. What ensued, though, is beyond her ability to understand.
Security camera footage showed bystanders kicking Zarhum asd he lay bleeding on the floor, and one even hurled a bench at his head. "That someone could crack open the head of a person lying helpless, his arms spread out, obviously not a danger to anyone, is inhuman," she says, then corrects herself: "I can't say 'inhuman' because a human being did it."
Police announced Monday that they would question all those seen in the footage attacking Zarhum and would bring the suspects to trial. "We cannot allow people to take the law into their own hands," said the police statement.
The head of the emergency room at nearby Soroka Hospital, to which Zarhum was rushed, says he most probably died as a result of the shooting wounds he sustained that caused extensive internal bleeding.
But Mekamel is unconvinced. "Maybe his life could have been saved if he not been beaten," she says. "But for so many years these asylum seekers have been targeted by cynical politicians, who call them a cancer and demand they be kicked out, and this is the result."
On the morning after her ordeal, Mekamel's heart goes out to the family of the 21-year-old Israeli soldier murdered by the terrorist – and to Zarhoum's family far away. "They are both victims of blind hatred. Something really horrifying is going on here."
Ruth Sinai is an Israeli journalist and social commentator.
http://cdn.i24news.tv/upload/cache/medium_image/upload/image/b7a9444717d1b92bb4aa83bbeed005024a701e51.jpg
Image:"The two victims of the Beersheba terror attack"
Received on Mon Oct 19 2015 - 06:07:12 EDT
