Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Violence Erupts in Israel, as Thousands Mark ‘Nakba Day’

Hundreds of Arabs from Syria stormed across the border into Israel on Sunday, prompting Israeli troops to respond with fire that killed at least four people.

The incident, which marked the first major eruption of violence along the border in decades, came on the same day that an Israeli Arab terrorist rammed a truck into pedestrians in Tel Aviv, killing one. Elsewhere around Israel and the West Bank, thousands of Palestinians protested to mark Nakba Day — the day Arabs mark the “catastrophe” of Israel’s birth on May 15, 1948.

The number of Arabs from Syria who breached the border on the Golan Heights was estimated at 400 to 1,000. The Israel Defense Forces declared the area of Majdal Shams, a Druze town near Mount Hermon, a closed military zone as Israeli troops tried to round up those who had infiltrated the border.

Israeli troops also fired on Palestinian protestors who approached Israel’s border with Gaza, wounding several teens, according to reports.

In Lebanon, thousands of Arabs reportedly converged on Israel’s border to demonstrate, but they were pushed back when the Lebanese Army fired warning shots into the air.

In Tel Aviv, Israeli law enforcement officials said they were considering the morning’s truck rampage, in which more than a dozen people were injured and one was killed, a terrorist attack. The 22-year-old man from the Israeli Arab village of Kafr Kassem who drove his truck into cars and pedestrians on a busy thoroughfare reportedly told police his tire had exploded, causing him to lose control of the vehicle.

In Jerusalem, Palestinian demonstrators also reportedly threw firebombs at Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem.

The violence came two days after a Palestinian teen was killed during a protest in eastern Jerusalem. The boy may have been shot by a security guard for several Jewish families who live in the area.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.