Netanyahu blasts violent attack on former Likud MK during condolence call

The prime minister said there was no excuse for attacking Yehuda Glick. 

By David Isaac, World Israel News

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the attack on former Likud MK and Temple Mount activist Yehuda Glick, who was violently assaulted last Thursday while paying a condolence call to the family of  Iyad al-Halak.

Halak was an autistic Arab mistakenly shot by Israeli police officers on May 31. When he aroused suspicion with police, they told him to halt. Instead, he ran. Fearing he was armed, they shot and killed him.

“What happened was a tragedy. This is a man with disabilities, with autism, unjustly suspected, and we expect it to be fully checked,” Netanyahu said on Sunday, having previously expressed his regret for the killing last week. “We all join in the family’s grief — it encompasses the entire Israeli public as well as the entire Israeli government.”

Netanyahu said to Minister of Internal Affairs Amir Ohana: “I know that you are doing the investigation. We are all sharing in the grief of the family. The entire Israeli public and the entire Israeli government embrace them, and we look forward to your full investigation.”

However, he said, “it does not justify the wild attack on Yehuda Glick. I am sure that this will be the case here as well.”

Glick visited the family to pay his condolences. He was set upon by a gang. “I’m happy I’m alive,” Glick said. They “tried to murder me, and God saved me.”

Glick related what happened during the attack. “Unfortunately, when I entered the comfort tent, one of the family members stood up and asked me what my name was. I told him ‘Yehuda Glick’, so he told me I was not welcome there.”

“I told him I respected that and I went out and then something pretty surreal happened,” he said.

“I got up and then a woman came up and told me ‘You are not wanted because you are a man of hate and violence and this is a house of love and peace.’ She had not finished her sentence when about 10 guys led by a black uniformed commander entered and just overwhelmed me with their blows.”

“They pushed me down the stairs, which is 25 steps, and just didn’t stop kicking, punching, punching and punching for about 50 meters, until I was fortunate there was a fire station on the edge of the street, but they did everything in their power,” Glick said, who noted that if they had firearms he is sure he would be dead.

A 20-year-old suspect was later arrested by police.

Glick is active in advocating for Jewish rights on the Temple Mount. He has never spoken out against Arabs.

On October 29, 2014, Glick was shot multiple times in an assassination attempt by a member of Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine. The would-be assassin was later killed in a shootout with police. He had served 11 years in Israeli prisons for security offenses.

Glick said after the attack, “I am the chairman of a nonprofit that I set up in the name of the peace of Jerusalem, which we are really trying to promote throughout the world – peace and interpersonal discourse.”