Raja Khatib, whose family members were killed in Saturday night’s Iranian attack on Tamra, called for those filmed singing anti-Arab nationalist chants as rockets fell on his village to be arrested.
Khatib lost his wife, Manar al-Qasem Abu al-Heija Khatib, two daughters, Shada (20) and Hala (13), and sister-in-law, Manar Diab Khatib on Saturday night after an Iranian strike destroyed his home.
Video taken from afar of a rocket barrage, in which people can be heard asking God to make the rockets fall on a village and singing an anti-Arab, racist song, “May your village burn,” circulated on social media Saturday night.
“I lost my two girls, my dear wife, and the wife of my brother. I lost them. And [people] said, ‘May your village burn,’” Khatib said in a video published by National Unity chair Benny Gantz on Tuesday.
“It hurt me. Just as you are condoling me, [that] hurt me,” he told Gantz.
“I am asking you to arrest them. Just as you do with fanatics from my sector, do this on the other side,” he said.
“We are cousins; we are brothers,” he said, adding that all those sowing division in society and among Arabs and Jews should be arrested and that the two sectors have no choice but to live together.
"We have no other land."
Police make no arrests
Residents of Tamra criticized Israel Police earlier this week for not arresting those filmed singing the racist song, remarking that Arab Israelis were arrested for similar offenses.
The police said they are “making serious efforts in an attempt to trace the distributors of the hate video in which a group of young people can be heard cheering following the missile strike in Tamra.”
“This is a video that was uploaded without any identifying details, no visible faces or location, just a partial shot of a balcony and mainly audio capturing the sound of the strike from a distance,” a police representative added.
“It is impossible to determine with certainty where the video was filmed, and it could very well have been recorded in Haifa, Tel Aviv, or even further south, as footage of the strikes has been identified from vast distances,” the police added, explaining why they have encountered difficulties in making the arrest.