The 22-year-old Israeli Jewish settler who pepper-sprayed William, a 9-year-old Armenian Christian boy, in Jerusalem on Yom Kippur has been released with a restraining order and four days of house arrest while the case proceeds. He is from Ganei Modi’in, a Haredi-majority Israeli settlement in the West Bank. Jerusalemite-Armenian journalist Kegham Balian reported the release, citing the original report by Israeli investigative journalist Yossi Eli.
“Had he been an Armenian man attacking a Jewish boy, Ben-Gvir would’ve put him in a hole,” Balian said, referring to Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who oversees the police.
Israeli police arrested him in northern Israel on Sunday, September 27, after locating him through intelligence work. Investigators had returned to the scene and reconstructed the attack together with William’s father.
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.
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.
“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.
William was treated by paramedics in an ambulance. Israeli Channel 13 aired the footage, in which 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, and 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 September 27.
William told Channel 13 that he now wears a helmet on his way home from school. Asked what he wanted, he said: “I just want him to be in prison.”
George Deek, Israel’s Special Envoy to the Christian World, announced the arrest publicly on September 28. 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.
On August 2, six Israelis, five minors and one adult, spat at the entrance of the Armenian Cathedral of St. James, banged on its gates 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. On September 26, surveillance footage captured an Israeli Jewish man attempting to urinate on the monastery wall before an Armenian guard forced him away.
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 occurred 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, 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 at around 2,000.
