A suspect was arrested on Friday in connection with the assault on former Likud Knesset member Yehuda Glick a day earlier, at the mourning tent of an autistic Arab man shot by Jerusalem police on May 30.
The suspect, who is in his 20s, is from the Wadi-al-Joz neighborhood north of the Old City of Jerusalem, denied any involvement and was released to house arrest.
Glick was assaulted and thrown down a flight of stairs while trying to pay condolences in eastern Jerusalem to the family of Iyad Halak, who was killed in Jerusalem’s Old City last weekend by police who mistakenly believed him to have been armed with a gun.
On Friday, Glick, a longtime activist for Jewish rights on the Temple Mount and a vocal interfaith peace advocate, put out a video after being released from the hospital in which he said it was a “miracle” that he was not more seriously harmed in the “murderous lynching.”
“I went [to the Halak funeral tent] in the name of people who want peace, [as] a gesture of goodwill,” Glick said in an interview with Channel 13 News. “When I entered the home and presented myself to the mourners, around 10 people suddenly grabbed me, lifted me up and threw me down a flight-and-a-half of stairs.”
Others then began to hit and kick him before one of Halak’s relatives intervened. That man, identified only as Sami by Israeli reports, said he believed Glick was trying to create a “provocation” by visiting the family.
“I was rescued for a second time from an assassination attempt. It’s too bad people don’t understand that violence only causes damage to all of us,” said Glick, referring to a 2014 attempt on his life outside the Begin Center in Jerusalem, where he was shot four times in the chest by an Arab who called him an “enemy of al-Aqsa.”
