Haredi youths filmed beating Palestinians near Jerusalem’s Old City

Nir Hasson reports in Haaretz on 29 September 2026:

Young Ultra-Orthodox men and teenagers attacked two Palestinian men at Damascus Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City overnight into Tuesday, footage shared online shows.  The video shows the two Palestinian men trying to flee up a flight of stairs as young Haredis beat them. One falls to the ground, and when he tries to get up, the teenagers push him back down and kick him. As he flees, another Haredi youth punches him.

The attackers arrived at the scene after attending a religious gathering in Jerusalem, where hundreds of participants blocked the light rail tracks. The participants also stole a municipal vehicle, threw stones and other objects at passersby, and lightly injured a Border Police officer and a civilian.

Police said 11 Haredim were arrested during the riots, but did not clarify whether the Palestinians’ attackers were among those arrested.

Hadash-Ta’al MK Ahmad Tibi condemned the attack in a post on X, writing: “Scum of the earth are hunting Palestinians at Bab al-Amud (Damascus Gate), attacking an elderly Palestinian man and celebrating. They should have been wearing brown shirts. Quite a celebration. And [where is] the police?”

Alon-Lee Green, leader of new Jewish-Arab party A Place for All and founder of the Standing Together movement, also condemned the violence. “Are they also ‘a handful’?” he wrote on X. “What is happening at Damascus Gate in Jerusalem night after night – hunting Arabs because they are Arabs – does that not represent a real phenomenon in Israel?”

The man attacked in the video is 66-year-old metalworker Ahmad Husseini, a resident of the Old City. He told Haaretz he was on his way to work when a large group of Haredi teenagers attacked him on the steps leading up from the gate plaza.

“They started beating me with their hands and feet. They didn’t say a word. They suddenly came at me and started hitting me. I tried to run away and fell twice. The first time, I tried to get up, but they beat me and I fell again, until I managed to get up and run away.”

He was taken to a local clinic and diagnosed with fractured ribs caused by the fall. Husseini filed a police complaint but does not know whether any suspects were arrested in connection with the attack.  “I’ve lived in the Old City for 40 years, and there have been incidents of people cursing at me, but this is the first time I’ve been beaten,” he said.

The incident comes amid heightened tensions and restrictions in Jerusalem’s Old City during the Sukkot holiday. On Sunday, police ordered dozens of Palestinian shopkeepers in the Muslim Quarter to close their businesses throughout the holiday to facilitate Jewish worshippers’ access to an area leading to the Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa compound.

One shopkeeper told Haaretz that the order affected all 56 shops and businesses on Cotton Merchants’ Street, as well as a branch of Al-Quds University. Another said shopkeepers understood that failing to comply could bring pressure from the Income Tax Authority, Health Ministry, municipality and other authorities.

Police said the shop closures were initiated by the shopkeepers’ committee and that any business owner who wished to open could do so. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel petitioned police to revoke the order, saying the blanket closure had no legal basis and was disproportionate.

The recent restrictions have coincided with a series of incidents involving Jewish extremists and Palestinians and Christians in and around the Old City.

Last week, Haaretz reported that a Jewish Israeli man pepper-sprayed a 9-year-old Palestinian boy from Jerusalem’s Armenian Christian community while he was riding his bicycle near Jaffa Gate on Yom Kippur. Police said they investigated the complaint and initially closed the case after pursuing all available leads, but later contacted the family and said they wanted to question the boy again.

Selichot prayers at the Western Wall ahead of Yom Kippur, last week. Credit: Itay Cohen
The boy’s mother said he had been living in fear since the attack and told her he wanted to wear a large helmet so people would not know he was not Jewish. She also said the family had been targeted in a similar incident about two years earlier.

According to Haaretz’s report, the Religious Freedom Data Center’s hotline has recorded 72 attacks, acts of vandalism and incidents of spitting targeting Christians since July, 68 of them in Jerusalem, most in and around the Old City. The center recorded 31 such incidents in all of 2025 and 30 in 2024.

In recent weeks, several incidents of spitting and attacks against Christians by Jewish teenagers on their way to the Western Wall for Selichot prayers have also been documented, according to Haaretz.

This article is reproduced in its entirety