Arabs threaten Jewish girls at Lod pool, one tried drowning a victim

The Arab girls made throat slitting gestures and said, “We can make you disappear.”

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

On the heels of Arab rioting in the mixed Jewish-Arab city of Lod, in which a Jewish man was killed by rock throwers, a Jewish girl was reportedly the victim of an attempted drowning at the local pool.

The 11-year-old girl, who was not identified by name, told the Orthodox Kikar HaShabbat paper that she had gone to the Lod municipal pool with her friends on a day with women-only swimming hours.

The visit to the pool was uneventful until “suddenly one Arab came over, a young girl, and jumped on me with her friends.”

“I was in the deep water, so I almost drowned. At the beginning I didn’t understand what was happening to me, what she wanted from [me], but then she pulled my swimsuit and made a hand motion on my neck as if she was slitting it, and her friend told me, ‘Palestine is on your head.’”

She told Kikar HaShabbat that the Arab girls continued hurling abuse at her, even after she left the pool.

“‘We will chase every Yahud [Jew] out of here, this is all ours, get out of here,’ they screamed at me. And then several women heard it and one of them called the police,” the girl said.

“Afterwards, when I came home, I told everything to my mother and I went together with her to the police station – my father at the time was teaching a class – and we’ll see what happens now.”

But according to Kikar HaShabbat, this was not an isolated incident.

Lod resident Revital, 26, said that she was attacked by Arabs at the pool on a different day.

“When we arrived at the pool, the Arabs we passed by cursed us, [saying we should die] and called us derogatory names, and we tried to ignore [them] as much as possible,” she said.

Once in the pool, Revital said an Arab intentionally kicked her and that a friend’s daughter was also threatened.

Confronting the group, the Jewish women asked the Arabs to let them swim in peace, which led to the Arabs screaming, “We hate you and all the Jews.”

“The whole time, meanwhile, I was filming them,” Revital said, “and when one of the Arabs realized, she came up to me making a move as if to punch me near my heart, cursed me that I [should] die, and tried to snatch my phone.”

Yet another woman told Kikar HaShabbat that her daughter had been threatened at the pool in a separate incident.

“My daughter came back from the Lod pool and now I found out that the Arab girls made slaughtering motions at the Jewish girls on their necks and told them, ‘We can make you disappear.’”

“Were it not for the intervention of one of the women at the pool, who called the police, it’s impossible to know how this story would have ended,” she said. “The girls come on the ‘separate’ day for women, and if in the past we could send our girls safely, now that can’t happen anymore.”

anti-SemitismArab violenceIsraeli ArabsLod