Yoram Sofer, the commander of the Coastal Police District and a leading candidate to be the next police chief, boasted that protesters didn’t block roads in his district, adding that when such attempts were made he handled them “with a heavy hand” in an interview with N12 partially published on Sunday.
“Brutality is brutality. Whoever attacks police officers attacks the state of Israel, not me personally. Therefore if they need to be arrested, they need to be arrested. If they need to be dispersed, they’ll be dispersed. If they can be spoken with and that’s enough, then that’s enough.”
Sofer has been the center of controversy in recent weeks as a number of incidents of alleged police brutality were reported against protesters in Caesarea and Hadera, which are under his jurisdiction.
Addressing the judicial reform protests, Sofer questioned “why do we need to allow the same harm to the public for eight months?”
“If you want to do something against democracy, there are elections, I am not the tool,” added Sofer. “You need to trust that I’ll do my job, in every place, with integrity, without considering all these things in the background.
A PROTEST OUTSIDE Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Jerusalem home. (credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)‘Ben-Gvir’s never told me to do something’
When asked if he would be willing to tell the national security minister “no,” Sofer responded “What do you mean? Why do I need to tell him ‘no’? You need to understand more or less what the minister’s intentions are, until today I have not seen the minister tell me once ‘do something.'”
In the past week, Israeli media outlets have reported that National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir does not intend to extend the tenure of Israel Police chief Kobi Shabtai and intends to announce this decision within the coming week.
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