Israeli student attacked at Paris metro for speaking Hebrew
A passerby called an ambulance that transferred him to the hospital, while the two assailant individuals fled the scene.
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFThe Israeli student who was attacked at the Paris metro(photo credit: COURTESY OF MEYER HABIB)
A 31-year-old Israeli student was attacked by two unknown individuals at a Paris metro station on Tuesday after he was heard speaking with his father on the phone in Hebrew.The student boarded the metro at the Château d’Eau station, while two men who heard his conversation began shouting, cursing and threatening him. One of them proceeded to attack him until the Israeli lost his consciousness.A passerby called an ambulance that transferred him to the hospital, while the two individuals fled the scene.“For the past few hours, I have been in constant contact with Yogev B., the young Israeli victim of an antisemitic attack, clearly motivated by the hate of Israel alone,” Member of the French National Assembly Meyer Habib wrote on Facebook.“While he was sending a WhatsApp voice message in Hebrew to his father, the student, currently on a university exchange program at HEC [Paris], was brutally beaten up – to the point of almost losing consciousness – by two individuals of African origin, right in the middle of a jam-packed metro train at the Château d’Eau station at 6:55 a.m.“He was taken in a state of shock and bloodied to Lariboisière Hospital, and needed several stitches to his face, his nose was broken and his face was covered with bruises.“The Israeli was released from the hospital and went straight to the police station to file a complaint,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry updated.Yaakov Hagoel, vice chairman of the World Zionist Organization and director of the Department for Israel & Countering Antisemitism, added that “Unfortunately it is dangerous to identify as a Jew on the streets of the world, enough with the hatred towards Jews. I demand world leaders to show zero-tolerance to antisemitism.”Last week, France’s National Assembly determined that Anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism, while more than 100 tombstones were desecrated with antisemitic text and swastikas at a Jewish cemetery in eastern France, near Strasbourg.
