Druze Student Beaten ‘for Speaking Arabic’ in Jerusalem
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin spoke with Tommy Hasson. Image by Facebook
A Druze student in Jerusalem was beaten with glass bottles by a gang.
Tommy Hasson, 21, told Israeli news website Ynet that he was leaving his job at a hotel Thursday night when a group of people approached him and began mocking him for speaking Arabic. One man spat on him, and after Hasson hit him back, they began beating him.
Hasson escaped to the Jerusalem Central Bus Station, where an ambulance took him to a hospital. He was released soon afterward.
“They just hit me,” he told Ynet. “Glass and bottles. There were a lot of people there who screamed, couldn’t do anything and couldn’t stop it. I only managed to escape to the bus station’s entrance after a few minutes and there a few people sat me down, gave me water and took care of me – they called an ambulance until the police arrived. They started asking me questions. In the meantime, blood ran down all over me – my head, my ears and on my shirt.”
A music student, Hasson was recently discharged from the Israel Defense Forces, where he served in the President’s Residence. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin spoke with Hasson and his father on the phone following the incident to express his support.
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
