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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

In Israeli bus station attack, disparate lives collide with deadly results

Batsheva Sobelman Los Angeles Times

JERUSALEM – Omri Levy, 19, was a soldier. He fought to join the famed Golani brigade, despite a bad back that could have exempted him from combat duty.

Mila Habtom Zerhom, 29, was an African asylum seeker. He fled his native Eritrea seeking a new life away from his country’s regime and made his way to Israel like tens of thousands of his countrymen.

Mohannad Al Oqbi, 21, was an Israeli Arab, a metal worker, who was a member of the Bedouin community in the southern part of the country.

The paths of these very different young people crossed tragically in the city of Beersheba on Sunday, leaving all three dead and prompting another round of soul searching in the communities they left behind.

Debate continued in Israel on Monday after the attack, in which Oqbi allegedly went on a shooting rampage through a crowded bus station, killing Levy and injuring 10 others. A security guard, assuming Zerhom was an accomplice, shot him, authorities said, after which an angry mob beat him. He died later at a hospital.

Remembrance candles glowed at the site of the attack Monday evening, a modest gesture for two victims who died as differently as they lived.

Levy was killed first. Authorities said Oqbi shot him with a handgun and then grabbed Levy’s automatic rifle and continued to shoot other civilians and police officers at the site. Returning from weekend leave, Levy had been headed to join friends, assigned as reinforcement near the border with Gaza to counter Palestinian protests. He was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.

Levy was from the small agricultural community of Sdei Hemed, whose residents had watched him grow up and, on Monday, saw him buried next to his father. Outside the Levy family home, death notices in simple black lettering were posted on the wooden garden fence as soldiers and neighbors huddled outside.

“We are all hurting today,” said Zeev Fatal, the community secretary. “It is a small community; we all knew him.”

Zerhom, the Eritrean man, had come to Beersheba to renew the visa that allows him temporary residence in Israel. He worked in a greenhouse near the Gaza border, where his employer, Sagi Malachi, told the Ynet news site that Zerhom was a dedicated, pleasant and modest man who did his work quietly and well.

When the shooting began in the bus station, he ran for cover, authorities said. A security guard, seeing a foreign-looking man on the run, assumed he was a terrorist and shot him. As Zerhom lay wounded on the floor in a pool of blood, a mob beat him, kicking him and bashing him with metal benches. Efforts by several to protect the injured man failed and he was taken to the hospital in critical condition.

One of the men recounted for television cameras how he beat the presumed terrorist. “He was dripping blood, dripping, dripping. Too bad he didn’t die,” he said.

But overnight he did. By that time, it was clear that he was not involved in the attack and police had announced there had been only one gunman.

Throughout Israel, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on down, there was widespread condemnation of what was widely described as a lynching.

“Even when the blood boils, such an act is strictly and utterly forbidden,” said opposition leader Isaac Herzog, who called the incident a “shocking lynching.”

“This is what sliding into an abyss looks like,” opposition lawmaker Dov Khenin wroteon Facebook. “One crime breeds another. Indiscriminate shooting in Beersheba. Fatality and injuries. Fear and hysteria. Lynching an asylum seeker. If each and every one of us does not act now to stop the fall, we will reach darker places yet.”

Zerhom was mourned by hundreds of African migrants held in the desert detention center of Holot, where Israel jails migrants who enters the country illegally.

The bus station attack was the latest of nearly daily attacks by Palestinians that have killed nine Israelis and injured dozens more. In many cases, civilians were involved in thwarting attacks, or in intercepting assailants during or after them.

About 40 Palestinians have been killed over the same time, about half of them assailants or would-be assailants. Most of the assailants were shot dead.

While Zerhom’s death raised questions of racism and vigilantism, the assailant’s identity also prompted debate.

Monday’s police announcement identifying the assailant as an Israeli citizen shocked Jewish and Bedouin communities in Israel’s south, where efforts to co-exist persist despite various challenges, and threatened to strain already tense relations between Israeli Jews and Arabs elsewhere.

Oqbi’s father, Khalil, had difficulty accepting the actions attributed to his son. “I condemn the acts of violence and I really don’t know what happened,” he said. “Mohannad was executed in the field and we know nothing of the act attributed to him in Beersheba. It is hard for me to believe he did it.”

Southern police chief Yoram Halevy met Monday with Bedouin leaders and in a later statement urged Israelis to refrain from generalizing about the entire community because of one extremist.