Widespread anger after racist attack on Palestinian schoolchildren in Israel

Palestinian citizens of Israel are expressing widespread anger after 13 middle school children were attacked by Israeli settlers during a school trip near Beit She’an.

The attack took place on Wednesday when a group of junior high school students from Ibn Khaldoun School in the northern Arab-majority city of Sakhnin went to the Ein Shokek park on a school trip.

A group of Jewish students approached them and were reported to have attacked the children, beating and spraying them with tear gas and pepper spray. The attack also injured two of the school officials.

A video that circulated on social media following the attack shows young children on the floor, with tears in their eyes.

Although all individuals have since been released from hospital after receiving medical treatment, parents and teachers say the children continue to suffer from psychological trauma following the incident.

The school’s community held marches and a sit-in on Thursday morning, condemning the attack and calling on Israeli authorities to respond to what they say was a "racially motivated attack".

Lack of action by Israel towards its Palestinian citizens

Wednesday’s incident has drawn particular criticism of Israel’s police and education ministries and their lack of engagement to counter attacks against members of its Palestinian community.

The school trip had received prior authorisation from Israel’s Education Ministry, with a school official telling Haaretz that "all the necessary permits and paperwork [was] approved by the ministry, and the route itself was authorised".

The Education Ministry merely issued a statement calling the incident "unacceptable", adding that it was monitoring the situation.

Parents accuse Israeli authorities of diminishing the severity of the situation and distorting the facts, with police describing the incident as a "clash". Israel’s emergency services, on their X platform, have also described the events as a "fight".

Witnesses of the attack told Haaretz that police only arrived at the scene after the assault had ended, adding that they were eventually forced to arrest the settlers "because they attacked the police, not because they attacked our children".

Three Israeli students and one of the school supervisors were arrested.

Escalating racism towards Palestinians

The sit-in at Ibn Khaldoun school was attended by Sakhnin mayor Mazen Ghnaim, who said this latest attack represented a dangerous escalation of racist violence targeting Palestinian citizens of Israel.

The attackers have been identified as teenage students from the Lev Hadash yeshiva in the illegal Israeli settlement of Shiloh, in the occupied West Bank.

Eyewitnesses described the students shouting racist slogans like "stinking Arabs, dirty Arabs" at the children.

Despite the settler students being supervised by four school principals, none of them were reported to have intervened to stop the attack on Palestinian students.

"Not one of them stopped what was happening", Hussam Ghanayem, head of the school’s parents’ committee said, "No one objected. It was as if nothing was going on".

Honenu, a right-wing legal organisation representing the four people arrested, claimed they had been "attacked by a group of Arabs".

Israeli opposition lawmaker Aymen Omeh, speaking about the attack, said "Attacks against Arab citizens, solely because they are Arabs, are becoming an everyday phenomenon. But a person is not born racist. The racist and inciting government bears the main responsibility."

Several ministers in the current Israeli government, particularly members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition, have been accused of using racist, inflammatory or dehumanising language to refer to Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians.

Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has previously been convicted of incitement to racism.

As Palestinian citizens of Israel identify government rhetoric as the source of racist incitement, members of the Sakhnin community have proposed assigning armed guards to accompany their children on trips outside the town, acting on the need to anticipate violence and intimidation.