Four Israelis were charged on Tuesday for brutally beating an Eritrean migrant worker as he lay bleeding from gunshot wounds after being mistaken for an Arab militant attacker last year.
Habtom Zarhum, 29, was shot by a security guard at a bus station in the southern city of Beersheba in October when he was wrongly identified as the assailant in an attack that killed an Israeli soldier.
Footage of the Eritrean bleeding as an angry mob descended on him with blows spread on social media, prompting soul searching among Israelis over their response to a wave of attacks as well as their treatment of African migrants. An Israeli public radio said that one of those charged with “deliberately causing serious bodily harm” was a prison officer and another a soldier.
Zarhum’s autopsy results showed that he died of gunshot wounds and not the vicious beating he received from bystanders as police officers looked on.
His death followed the outbreak of a surge of violent attacks across Israel and the occupied West Bank.
Following Zarhum’s death, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly called on Israelis not to take justice into their own hands, but many see the young man’s killing as part of a wider problem in Israel’s treatment of African asylum-seekers.
