crime

What do you call it?

It’s startling sometimes the difference an hour or two can make. Wednesday went from a quiet morning with my infant daughter and not much happening in Israel, to a gunfight on the Egypt border between smugglers and IDF troops, and then, later in the day, a deadly attack in Jerusalem in which a Palestinian man rammed his car into passengers at a light rail stop, killing a 3-month-old girl and wounding 8 others. From that point on a familiar scene played …

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The Popo conference call has problems

Somebody’s dog won’t shut the fuck up, and some fool – let’s call him Amichai – keeps dropping in and out of the conference call, bringing things to a halt each time. Once a week or so the Israel Police hold a conference call with crime reporters from all the national outlets. It’s usually when a big story breaks, or before a gag order is lifted, and they want to make sure everybody has the police narrative and the chance to …

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The bombs at those other schools

  No one knows how long the bombs were stashed at the school, but it could have been weeks, maybe longer, that hundreds of kids passed through the school none the wiser. The weapons were stashed in a closet inside a classroom that hadn’t been used for some time. It was a serious haul: 13 mortar shells, three rifles, incendiary flares, and sacks filled with hundreds of rounds of .9mm ammunition. The arsenal was found in Abu Snan only a few …

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On Price Tag attacks, tough talk and weak suggestions

  Carmi Gillon is not impressed. Following a series of “Price Tag” attacks (acts of vandalism or violence directed at Arabs, often in response to Israeli government policy in the Palestinian Territories) within the Green Line, the former Shin Bet Chief said Israel could stop the attacks if the authorities really wanted to and that like the agency dealt with the Jewish underground when he was in charge, they could do the same if they just had the willpower. “We don’t …

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Reporting While Arab (RWA)

Sharon police Commander Kobi Shabtai had barely made his introduction to reporters at the sub-district headquarters in Kfar Saba on Monday morning, when he started to come under fire. “The police don’t pay any attention to us, you don’t give us access like the Hebrew press”, said a female reporter for a major Arabic radio station describing her inability to find police investigators or spokespeople to talk to at murder scenes or to get on the phone afterwards. She mentioned an …

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Facebooking the underworld

Not long before his legs would be blown off in a car bomb in Ashkelon last night, Dror Damari took to Facebook to wish his friends a good week. Over the course of the next day, around a dozen people left condolence notes on the post, most wishing the newly paraplegic young man a healthy recovery, as he lay in the trauma ward of Ashkelon’s Barzilay Hospital. Damari, reportedly an associate of mobster Shalom Domrani, did not have a locked Facebook …

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The spy in short shorts came to court

“Did you see the picture he took at Natbag (Ben Gurion International Airport)”, one of the photographers outside the court-room on Monday morning asked, before another answered “it looks like he took that with a Nokia phone, and it’s not even in focus”. The press scrum was waiting at the Petah Tikvah Magistrate’s Court on Monday morning for the remand hearing for Iranian-Belgian businessman Ali Mansouri, whose arrest earlier this month on a series of espionage charges was reported to the …

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Snuff photos and gag orders in the age of the smart phone

A smartphone was burning a hole in someone’s pocket on Saturday as he (or she) stood over the headless and dismembered body of a young woman dumped in a suitcase next to the Hagana train station in south Tel Aviv. Moments later there was a picture, and within a day, the shot and a few others went viral on WhatsApp on a cellular collision course violating with impunity a police gag order – one that restricted the release of information on …

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Four years in the making

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, …

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The usual suspects

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 …

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