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 …
“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 …
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 …
Snuff photos and gag orders in the age of the smart phone Read More »
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 …
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 …
I first got a pager in 1995. I was 16, and there was little need for me to have one. Occasionally I’d get a page, 911 at the end if it was important, and then hustle to the nearest pay phone to make a call. If I was being honest, probably 9 out of 10 pages were from my dad. Fifteen years later, I got a pager again, but this time, owing to the efficiency of The Jerusalem Post, I have …