A 9-year-old Christian boy was pepper-sprayed while riding his bike in Jerusalem on Yom Kippur last month, the most sacred day in the Jewish calendar. Police have arrested a man suspected in the attack. The boy, an Armenian identified only as William, told Israel’s Channel 13 that he was listening to music as he rode near the Mamilla Mall, close to the Old City walls, The Times of Israel reports.
A religious man stopped him there and told him to turn the music down. William complied and answered in English. The man then reportedly shouted “No English, Jews!” at him. As William rode off, he said the man sprayed him with pepper spray he had hidden behind his back. A friend riding with him was also hit by some of the spray, he said.
“I thought I was going to die,” William was quoted as saying. Citing Israeli media, The Telegraph reports that Jewish extremists confronted the boy and demanded he take off his headphones. Footage from later that day shows a confused and upset William in an ambulance. William’s mother told Haaretz that the attacker turned on her son once he realized the boy could not speak Hebrew. She said William has had trouble sleeping since.
George Deek, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s envoy to Christians worldwide, wrote on X that incidents like this must be treated “seriously, urgently, and with zero tolerance,” and that police had done so. Police announced on Sunday that they had arrested a 22-year-old man from Ganei Modi’in, a mostly ultra-Orthodox settlement near Jerusalem.
Officers found him in northern Israel, where he had spent several days, and brought him to a Jerusalem police station for questioning.