Officer Filmed Kicking Protester Suspended; Police Chief Says "We Will Deal Harshly With Any Deviations"

Police Commissioner Danny Levy said this evening (Wednesday) that if the investigation into videos from the protest held this morning on Route 4 at the entrance to Bnei Brak finds that commanders or officers broke protocol, serious steps will be taken against them, including suspension from operational duty. Levy said: "If we see that commanders and officers at the protest did not act according to procedure, we will not hesitate to deal with it harshly and suspend them from operational duty. There were senior commanders at the protest, and my expectation is that they control the event."

In a direct follow-up to those remarks, Tel Aviv District Commander ניצב חיים סרגרוף ordered the immediate suspension from operational duty of the officer who was filmed kicking a protester during the protest, pending the completion of a review of the circumstances of the incident. The suspension was carried out later that same evening.

The protest included a complete blockage of Route 4. In a police statement, it was written that "tens of thousands of drivers and civilians were held hostage in massive traffic jams, causing severe damage to a major transportation artery and a complete disruption of daily life."

During efforts to clear the road, several serious incidents were caught on camera and sparked a wave of criticism. Among them, the commander of the Ramat Gan–Bnei Brak police station, Deputy Superintendent Yuval Shavit, was filmed tearing a protester’s pants and dragging him on the road. Another officer was filmed kicking a protester in the head. In addition, officers were filmed running toward protesters after smoke grenades were thrown and beating them with batons. The footage spread across social media and triggered widespread outrage.

According to reports, Rabbi Yaakov Markovitz, brother of Ponevezh Yeshiva head Rabbi Shmuel Markovitz, tried in the minutes before the escalation to persuade station commander Shavit to calm things down. The commander responded that everything would be done in coordination. Just a few minutes later, officers began beating the protesters with force.

The police said in their statement that officers were also injured in the clashes: two officers were hurt while clearing the road and required medical treatment. Five people accused of disorderly conduct were arrested on suspicion of assaulting officers and disturbing public order. The police said: "The freedom to protest is a fundamental right, but blocking major roads, harming freedom of movement, and severe violence are not protest—they are anarchy."

As reported earlier, after the protest, Shas chairman Aryeh Deri appealed to National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, demanding action: "It cannot be that what the police did not do in Kaplan against anarchists who wanted to destroy the state, they are now doing against citizens crying out that they have been turned into criminals simply because they study Torah. Get up now and stop the police violence against bnei Torah."

Knesset member Meir Porush of United Torah Judaism called for an urgent discussion in the National Security Committee, describing the police conduct as "a policy of discriminatory enforcement." He added that "the kind of violent dispersal of a protest that we saw this morning is something we know from Turkey and Iran." Ben Gvir himself announced that he would hold an urgent discussion on the police use of stun grenades.