Belgium Insists Anti-Terror Troops Guarding Synagogues Are Armed
Image by Getty Images (8)
Belgium’s defense ministry denied reports that some soldiers had guarded synagogues in Brussels without ammunition in their rifles.
The denial last week by the press department of Belgium’s Ministry of Defense was in reaction to a claim that a senior Brussels rabbi, Menachem Hadad of the Shomre Hadas haredi Orthodox community, made on March 24 following a series of terrorist attacks on March 22 that killed 32 people in the Belgian capital.
“The authorities here, and I won’t speak ill of them, but they have no understanding of security issues – zero,” Hadad said in a March 24 interview with Israel’s Army Radio. “For example, for months we had soldiers guarding the Beit Chabad and the synagogue and we spoke to them and some had no ammunition for their rifles. They had no bullets. It was just a show. It’s not normal.”
Queried by JTA for its reaction to the claim, a ministry spokesperson replied via email that “since January 2015 the defense ministry aids the federal police in protecting certain areas. To do this, soldiers receive standard equipment necessary for operational intervention, including weapons and ammunition.”
The unnamed spokesperson further wrote the ministry will not elaborate on its rules of engagement “for security reasons.”
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
