Angry protesters on Tuesday clashed with Israeli police over an off-duty officer’s killing of a young man of Ethiopian origin, as the incident drew fresh accusations of racism.
Crowds of Ethiopian Israelis battled police and blocked highways on at least 15 junctions across the country, with 47 officers wounded and 60 demonstrators detained, according to a police statement.
Thousands of motorists were stranded in huge traffic jams.
Photo: AFP
Solomon Teka, reportedly 18 or 19, was buried on Tuesday, after he was shot dead in Kiryat Haim, a town near the northern port city of Haifa, late on Sunday.
His killing sparked outrage among members of the Ethiopian community, who say their young people live in constant fear of police harassment because they are black.
Dozens of protesters in Haifa blocked traffic at a central junction, as outraged motorists honked horns and police observed from a safe distance.
“We’ll do whatever we can to make sure police will stop killing people because of their skin color,” one protester, identifying himself as Mengisto, told reporters.
“We don’t know if this is going to happen again or not,” the 26-year-old said of Sunday’s fatal shooting. “But we need the confidence that if the state or police give us guarantees, it won’t.”
Images showed bonfires and burning tires on roads, with some protesters vandalizing vehicles that attempted to breach the impromptu blockades.
Police allowed demonstrators to block the roads in some locations, taking care to keep direct confrontations to a minimum, but later in the evening, after updated figures showed the high number of officers wounded, police said in a statement that they would no longer allow protesters to act violently and vandalize property.
“Police were accordingly using force to clear all the roads,” a police statement read.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu late on Tuesday issued a video saying that “everyone was mourning the tragic death of Solomon Teka.”
While acknowledging that “there are problems that need to be solved,” Netanyahu implored demonstrators to “stop blocking junctions.”
About 140,000 Ethiopian Jews live in Israel, including more than 50,000 born in the country.
The community has consistently complained of state racism.
Thousands in January took to the streets of Tel Aviv after a young community member was shot dead by a police officer when he allegedly rushed at him holding a knife.
In Sunday’s shooting, police initially said that the officer saw a fight between “a number of youths” nearby and tried to break it up.
However, the other young men and a passerby said the officer was not attacked, media reported.
Interviewed on public radio on Tuesday, the dead man’s cousin, Amir Teka, bridled when asked how he felt about the protests sparked by the “killing.”
“It cannot be that a person is next to his home and gets murdered and they say ‘killed,’” he said. “What was it? A work accident? Was he hit by a car?”
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