JERUSALEM, May 7 (Reuters) – An Israeli man suspected of shoving a French Catholic nun to the ground and kicking her in Jerusalem has been charged with assault motivated by religious hostility, Israel’s state attorney’s office said on Thursday.
The April 28 attack was condemned by Christian clergy in Jerusalem and came amid a rise in harassment of religious officials and pilgrims by religious Jews in the walled Old City, home to sites holy to Christians, Muslims and Jews.
Yonah Shreiber, 36, was arrested a day after the attack. CCTV footage shows the attacker, wearing a Jewish kippah and ritual tassels, chase the nun from behind before pushing her to the ground. He then began to kick a passerby who tried to intervene, the footage shows.
The man “was charged with assault causing actual injury motivated by hostility toward the public on the grounds of religion, as well as simple assault,” the state attorney’s office said in a statement. Reuters was not immediately able to locate a lawyer representing him.
The nun suffered bruises on her face and leg due to the attack, the statement said.
The attorney’s office asked the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court, where it filed the indictment, to hold the man in detention until the legal proceedings against him conclude.
Jerusalem’s Old City in recent years has seen frequent incidents in which religious Jews spit on Christian sites or otherwise try to intimidate Christians and Christian clergy in the city, members of the city’s Christian community say.
Israel’s police force says it works to prevent such incidents. Following the April 28 attack, the force said it “treats any attack on members of the clergy and religious communities with the utmost seriousness and applies a policy of zero tolerance to all acts of violence”.
(Reporting by Emily RoseEditing by Peter Graff)
