Israeli police arrested a 22-year-old suspect on Sunday evening over the pepper-spray attack on William, a 9-year-old Armenian Christian boy from Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter, days after the case had been closed without charges. The suspect is a resident of Ganei Modi’in, a Haredi-majority Israeli settlement in the West Bank. Jerusalemite-Armenian journalist Kegham Balian first reported the arrest, citing William’s parents.
Police said the suspect had been staying in northern Israel in recent days and was located through intelligence work before officers arrested him there. Investigators had returned to the scene and reconstructed the attack together with William’s father. The suspect was taken to a police station in Jerusalem for overnight questioning.
“Israel Police views with great gravity acts of violence and bullying against minors, especially those carried out with a nationalist or racist motive,” police said.
William was riding his bicycle on Mamilla Boulevard near Jaffa Gate on Yom Kippur, listening to music through headphones, when he was attacked. His mother told Haaretz that a man she estimated to be around 30 signaled her son to stop while keeping one hand behind his back. “He planned it in advance. William stopped, took off his headphones and said something to him in English, and then the man sprayed him.” She said the man attacked after realizing her son did not speak Hebrew.
Israeli Channel 13 journalist Yossi Eli, who first reported the incident, said the attackers approached the child with threats and demanded he remove his headphones. After William complied, they heard him speaking English, and one said “No English, Jews!” before spraying him.
William was treated by paramedics in an ambulance, and Channel 13 aired the footage on Friday. In the video circulated afterward, his mother can be heard comforting him and reassuring him that his younger sister Arev was safe.
The family filed a police complaint after William was treated at the hospital. Police closed the case almost immediately. Asked by Haaretz to explain, police said the file was closed “after all investigative directions were examined and in accordance with the evidentiary basis that was formed.”
“I promised him the police were trying to catch him, and then they announced they closed the case,” William’s mother said. “I got a slap in the face.”
The morning after Channel 13 broadcast the story, police called the family and asked to question William again. The investigation was reopened, and the arrest followed on Sunday evening.
Channel 13 reported that it was the second time William had been attacked.
William told Channel 13 that he now makes a point of wearing a helmet on his way home from school. Asked what he wanted, he said: “I just want him to be in prison.”
“We, as a Jewish people who survived the Holocaust and suffer from anti-Semitism in the world, should be ashamed of the hatred that extremists show towards Christians,” Eli said.
George Deek, Israel’s Special Envoy to the Christian World, announced the arrest publicly on Monday. Deek was appointed to the newly created post on April 23, 2026, after serving as Israel’s ambassador to Azerbaijan.
“Israel takes violence against Christians seriously. And when the victim is a child, there can be no excuses and no looking the other way,” Deek said. “Hatred must be condemned, and those responsible will be held accountable.” He added that he hoped William and his family felt the support of people across Israel who were appalled by the attack.
On August 2, six Israelis, five minors and one adult, spat at the entrance of the Armenian Cathedral of St. James and threw stones at the compound and at the window of an Armenian woman filming them from her home. Four more were arrested over that attack at the end of August.
The Religious Freedom Data Center, an independent Israeli watchdog founded in June 2023 by the scholar Yisca Harani, recorded 50 anti-Christian incidents between April and June 2025. Sixty-four percent took place within the Old City, and half of those were centered around the Armenian Patriarchate, making it the most frequently targeted Christian site in Jerusalem. The Rossing Center’s 2025 report documented 155 incidents in total, including 61 physical assaults, 52 attacks on church property, 28 incidents of verbal harassment, and 14 cases of vandalism against Christian signs and symbols.
The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem dates to the 7th century, and Armenian presence in the city is documented from at least the 4th. The Armenian community of the Old City numbered 1,598 in 1967 and now stands below 1,000.
