Jerusalem court acquits a man indicted in nun attack, orders psychiatric care

JERUSALEM (AP) — A Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court judge acquitted a man accused of attacking a Catholic nun based on his insanity defense, but ordered him committed to psychiatric hospitalization for up to six years.

The violent assault in April on a nun walking in her habit in Jerusalem’s Old City sent shock waves across Israel and its many Christian communities .

Clergy and advocates say verbal abuse and spitting have grown increasingly common in the densely packed historic heart of Jerusalem. There, Christians, Jews and Muslims daily cross paths, mostly uneventfully, as they visit some of the holiest sites of Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

But the violent beating of the nun was seen as a rare and worrisome escalation in the volatile environment that people of all faiths have been experiencing in nearly three years of war .

On Wednesday, a judge ruled that there was evidence that a Jewish man from a settlement in the occupied West Bank committed the actions he was charged with, but he was entitled to an insanity defense after the district psychiatrist found he was psychotic at the time of the attack.

The director of The French Biblical and Archeological School of Jerusalem, where the nun is a researcher, told The Associated Press that he hoped the psychiatric hospitalization would be carried out in full “so that public safety can be assured, our colleague can recover psychologically, and people can live in and visit Jerusalem without fear, regardless of their belonging to any community.”

But Friar Olivier Poquillon added he regretted the decision not to impose a criminal penalty.

“At the moment of the incident, his judgment was nevertheless sufficient for him to deliberately choose a Catholic nun as his victim from among all the people present,” he said.

Yisca Harani, who founded the organization Religious Freedom Data Center to track harassment of Christians, said even mentally unstable people can be influenced to act by the prevailing discourse around them.

“He is still someone who is the product of either the ignorance or the incitement that is around him,” she said. “Even if he is mentally unstable, he was fed with all that anti-Christian material that is around us now.”

Harani’s organization has tracked a near-tripling of incidents in Jerusalem from four years ago to the last three months recorded — about one a day now — virtually all by Jewish religious nationalists.

Their hostility to Christians is grounded in the history of persecution of Jews in Christian-majority European countries, in faith practices they see as idol-worshipping, and in seeing their presence as an affront near areas historically sacred to Jews, like the Western Wall, experts say.

Ambassador George Deek, Israel's new special envoy to the Christian world, said that earlier this month, Israeli police appointed an English-speaking officer to be a first point of contact for Christians in case of incidents, “so there will be a rapid response.”

“We are going to come up with practical solutions to how we can minimize or stop, if possible, the phenomenon,” Deek said. “We take these issues very seriously.”

Associated Press journalist Koral Saeed contributed from Herzliya, Israel.

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