Young settlers attacked on Wednesday, February 5, a group of Arab students, during a school field trip near Beit She’an in northern Israel. The students encountered a group of Jewish yeshiva students from a West Bank settlement at the occupied Palestinian territories. The settlers spat on the Sakhnin students, sprayed them with tear gas and pepper spray, threw objects, kicked and beat them, and shouted insults like “dirty Arabs” and “stinking Arabs.”

MK Ayman Odeh: “The attacks on Arab citizens, just because they are Arab, have become a daily occurrence” (Photo: Al-Ittihad)

The middle school principal, Kamal Abu Younis, who runs Ibn Khaldun Middle School in the northern city of Sakhnin, tells “The Times of Israel”, “the settlers threw all sorts of things, kicked and spit on them, called them ‘dirty Arabs,'” “It’s a shocking situation, I’ve been working in education for 40 years and I’ve never encountered such a case,” he adds. Police arrested the assailants — three settlers from the West Bank yeshiva.

Hadash MK Ayman Odeh decries the incident as “racist terror” in a social media post. “The attacks on Arab citizens, just because they are Arab, have become a daily occurrence. But a person is not born racist. The racist and inciting government is the main culprit,” he says.