Israel Police on Alert after Mosque Attack
Israeli police were on high alert in the north of the country on Tuesday after an attack targeting a mosque in a Bedouin village, where locals staged angry protests overnight, police said.
"Large numbers of police remain deployed in the village of Tuba Zangaria," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told Agence France Presse.
"Last night, there was a series of demonstrations during which rocks were thrown as security forces, who responded with anti-riot means to disperse the protesters," he said, adding a clinic and a cultural center had been set alight.
The protests erupted just hours after vandals torched a mosque in the northern village in the northern Galilee region in an attack blamed on rightwing extremists.
The mosque was badly damaged by fire in the overnight attack, with the perpetrators scrawling the words "tag" and "revenge" on the walls.
Police called the attack "a very severe price tag incident" -- a term which usually refers to acts of vengeance against Palestinians and their property by Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
The attackers also graffitied the word "Palmer" on the walls of the mosque in an apparent reference to Asher Palmer, an Israeli settler who died with his infant son in the southern West Bank on September 23 after his car was hit by stones thrown by Palestinians, causing it to crash.
Although such acts of vengeance normally occur in the occupied West Bank, a similar attack targeted another mosque in Ibtin village in Galilee last year.
Monday's attack was condemned by officials across the Israeli political spectrum, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying the images were "shocking and do not belong in the state of Israel."
President Shimon Peres also condemned the attack and visited the mosque along with the country's two chief rabbis.
Source: Agence France Presse
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