October 13, 2026
A young Druze woman was attacked and insulted with a racist nature on a public bus on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, after she spoke Arabic on the phone. According to a report prepared by journalist Alon Hachmon and published by Maariv newspaper, the incident began when the young woman received a phone call from her boyfriend while she was sitting in the back of the bus. Minors surprised her by throwing socks at her about eight times, in addition to documenting the incident on mobile phones and mocking her amid complete silence from the other passengers.
As the agency tried to ignore what happened, the attacks escalated to include insults using profanity and expressions of sexual harassment, interspersed with explicit racist phrases such as “You stinking Arab, there is no place for you in the country.” The young woman explained that she was in a state of panic as a result of the incident, expressing her shock that none of the passengers on the crowded bus intervened to defend or help her.
At the direction of her father, the young woman filed an official complaint at the Bnei Brak Police Station on August 6, 2026. After about two weeks, the family was surprised by the closure of the file under the pretext of the investigators’ inability to obtain the recordings of the bus’s surveillance cameras, which prompted the father and brother to move themselves and obtain the recording that clearly documented the assault of a group of minors, both boys and girls.
After the video clip was handed over to the police, the investigation was reopened, but the young woman indicated that the investigators were unable to determine the identity of those involved, while the family succeeded in identifying them later after publishing the details of the incident and interacting with it on the Internet, where one of the participants in the attack tried to justify the act by claiming that the Palestinian woman chanted the phrase “Freedom for Palestine” when she boarded the bus, which the young woman categorically denied.
The young woman concluded her affirmation of her family’s patriotism by saying that her father devotes his life to extremely sensitive and important tasks for the benefit of the state, and that her brother served as a pilot in the Israeli army. She considered that attempts to justify the attack by fabricating allegations reflect a difficulty in accepting the other and its consequences, and she described this as shameful.
