A 23-year-old man was charged Monday in a Tel Aviv court with attempted murder for the stabbing of a police officer last month during a protest against law enforcement’s handling of a probe into a hit-and-run that killed a child.
Habtamu Assars, a Holon resident, was also charged with threatening a woman with a knife, assaulting a man with a plank, and “performing indecent acts” toward police who tried to arrest him.
The charge sheet said Assars planned the attack on an officer at the Tel Aviv protest, bringing a 32-centimeter-long (12.5-inch) knife to the demonstration.
The protest was led by members of the Ethiopian community, who accuse authorities of racism and leniency toward the driver who hit and killed 4-year-old Rafael Adana in May.
The traffic officer was stabbed in the shoulder while on duty relatively far from the protest itself, police said. He was moderately hurt with a stab wound between the neck and shoulder and taken to Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital for treatment.
In a separate incident that occurred five days after the stabbing, Assars threatened a woman with a knife in Tel Aviv. When another man intervened he beat him with a wooden plank, the charges said.
A woman holds up a photo of 4-year-old Rafael Adana, during a protest in Tel Aviv on August 30, 2023, calling for justice after he was killed in a hit-and-run in Netanya in May. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
The prosecution asked the court to extend Assars’s remand in custody, calling him “a violent and dangerous person.”
Shortly after the stabbing, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement saying, “Stabbing a police officer crosses a red line. Protests are a sacred right in a democratic country, but we will not accept… any type of violence.”
Another three officers were injured during the same protest, police said, when some protesters threw stones and other objects. At least 10 people were arrested during the protest for “throwing stones, attacking police officers, and violating public order.”
Subsequent protests have also turned violent.
Members of the Ethiopian community and activists clash with police during a protest calling for justice for 4-year-old Rafael Adana, who was killed in a hit-and-run in Netanya in May. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)
The Adana family said in a statement at the time, “We’re asking our brothers, sisters and friends to show restraint. There is great pain, but we don’t want an escalation, but solutions and justice for Rafael.”
“The last thing that we want or need is for them to portray our whole community as violent and problematic,” the family said.
Hundreds of demonstrators, mainly from Israel’s Ethiopian community, repeatedly gathered in Tel Aviv to draw attention to the death of Adana, who was hit by a car while walking with his grandfather in Netanya on Shabbat, May 6. He was critically wounded and died in a hospital several days later.
The driver, 70-year-old Carol Fessler, fled the scene, later claiming she “didn’t feel” the vehicle striking anything. She turned herself in to police several hours later and provided testimony about the car collision, Channel 12 reported.
Rafael Adana (Facebook; used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)
Many members of the community were furious that even several months later, the driver had not been charged in the incident, and have accused the police of dragging their feet and expressing leniency toward the driver. The community has charged authorities with discriminatory legal treatment in the past.
The death of Adana has also been the subject of a wealth of rumors and misinformation. While many initial accounts claimed that the driver’s daughter, Dr. Heidi Fessler, was also in the car during the incident, police later released evidence showing that the elder Fessler was alone at the time. Other false rumors, some of which have fueled the protests, include a claim that either mother or daughter attempted to hide evidence on the car, which the police have also denied.
Prosecutors have said that evidence collected proves the accident was unavoidable, and that Fessler will be tried for negligence, and not for manslaughter.
