Palestinian Couple Lose Jobs After Aiding Jewish Terror Victims
A Palestinian husband and wife who helped a Jewish family following a deadly terrorist attack in July are looking for work in Israel after being fired for assisting Jews.
Yochai Damari, the head of the Har Hebron Regional Council, in a Facebook post Sunday called on the Defense Ministry to procure work permits in Israel for the couple, who are medical professionals. Damari said he sent a letter to Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman requesting the permits.
Rabbi Miki Mark, a father of 10, was killed in the July 1 terror attack near Hebron. A car with Palestinian license plates overtook the Marks’ vehicle and opened fire with automatic weapons, causing the car to flip over.
His wife, Chava, was seriously injured and had major brain surgery on Sunday.
Immediately following the shooting, the Palestinian couple pulled the teenage children and their mother from the car and gave them emergency treatment until ambulances arrived and took them to the hospital. They continued to help the family and protect them from Palestinian passers-by who threatened them and called on the couple to stop assisting them, Damari said.
Damari said he met with the couple, who asked him for help in obtaining work in Israel.
“I am aware of the difficulties, but I think that in cases like this it is our obligation as the Jewish nation to show our thanks to people who behave as upstanding people and act in a way expected of them in situations like this,” Damari said.
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