Israeli Police Officers Demoted Over Mishandling of Kidnapping Phone Call
Image by Haaretz
Several senior police officers were demoted for “severe failure of conduct” in their handling of the phone call from one of three kidnapped Israeli teenagers.
A committee investigating the call found that the police officers at the Judea and Samaria Police emergency call center considered the call a prank and did not follow up by notifying the army, according to protocol.
The center received the call at 10:25 p.m. June 12 from someone who whispered “We’ve been kidnapped,” according to the panel’s findings released Monday. The call was cut off after two minutes.
A senior officer who called the number back eight times received busy signals and then the voice mail. The officer did not tell her supervisors about the call.
The soldier who received the call initially was found to have acted properly by transferring the call to a supervisor. The bodies of the three teens — Gilad Shaar, Naftali Frenkel and Eyal Yifrach — were found in the West Bank on Monday afternoon in a field north of Hebron.
“Not providing a proper response to a man’s cry of distress is an unforgivable event by every measure that can ultimately undermine the public confidence in the police, which is a cornerstone of police activity,” Israel Police Commissioner Yohanan Danino said after the release of the report.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
