Young couple, along with their four year-old son, narrowly escape Arab mob; “if they’d had a gun, it would have ended differently.”
A young Jewish couple from the town of Beit El, along with their four year-old son, narrowly escaped death after an Arab lynch mob attacked their car near Jerusalem’s A-Tur neighborhood.
Asaf and Naama Bruchi were travelling through the largely Arab neighborhood when their car stopped in traffic. Suddenly, they were pelted by rocks and other missiles, and found their car surrounded by Arab thugs.
“We were on our way to an event in the new ‘Kedmat Tzion’ neighborhood, on the way to A-Tur,” recalled Asaf. A-Tur is the neighborhood bordering the road from the Hebrew University at Mount Scopus to the Mount of Olives.
“We got caught in traffic and there was no police presence. We found ourselves in the middle of a lynch mob – huge rocks were thrown at the car, and the Arabs were physically hitting and slashing it.”
He says the police never arrived, and he narrowly escaped by driving on to the Beit HaChoshen neighborhood, a Jewish enclave adjacent to the ancient cemetery on the Mount of Olives, where he met a number of other Jewish drivers whose cars had been stoned.
“My wife was struck by a rock on her head and her hand, I got hit in the head by a rock. My four year-old son was sitting behind me and got hit by a rock in his back,” he said, adding that “if they would have had a gun we would have left there dead.”
Commenting on the lack of police presence in the area, and the seeming impunity of Arab mobs to target Jewish passersby, Asaf said that the feeling he got was that “their is a lack of [Israeli] sovereignty” in the area.
