Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Jewish Agency Launches Inquiry into Fatal Hotel Shooting

The Jewish Agency is opening an inquiry into its Oranim program after an American participant gunned down a hotel employee in Eilat.

“In response to the tragic incident in Eilat, the Chairperson of the Jewish Agency, Natan Sharansky expressed his deep sorrow at the loss of life and has appointed a panel to examine the processes by which the American participant was accepted to the Oranim program in Eilat,” a statement said Friday.

The shooter, identified in Israeli media only as being Jewish, in his 20s and from New York City, was killed by Israeli soldiers shortly after he gunned down a hotel worker in Eilat and holed up in a hotel room.

Israel Radio reported that the soldiers rushed to the hotel Friday morning after the tourist used the firearm of a security guard at Eilat’s Leonardo Club Hotel to kill an employee in the hotel’s dining room.

Y-Net identified the victim as Armando Abed, a 33-year-old sous-chef from Mi’ilya in the Western Galilee.

The soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces anti-terrorist unit surrounded the room in which the man was holed up after the shooting, reports said. Police negotiated with him to surrender but the soldiers shot and killed him after he opened fire on police negotiators.

The man was in Israel as part of an exchange program for American young people and had reportedly recently been fired as a hotel employee.

“The Oranim program is one of 200 long term programs which are funded by Masa Israel, a joint project of the government of Israel and the Jewish Agency for Israel,” the Jewish Agency said in its statement. “Since 2003, over 70,000 young Jews from around the world have participated in Masa programs, which include volunteer work, study and internships.”

The shooter reportedly arrived in the morning hours to hotel’s kitchen, where he began fighting with the employee whom he killed.

He reportedly snatched a firearm from a female security guard who arrived at the kitchen to break up the fight.

He escaped with the firearm and holed up in one of the rooms, police said, adding that he did not take any hostages with him.

The incident may have started over a financial dispute between the two dead men, according to Israel Radio.

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.