by Our Foreign Desk

AN ERITREAN refugee died yesterday after being shot by an Israeli security guard and attacked by an angry mob as he lay bleeding.

The guard, who opened fire again as Mulu Habtom Zerhom crawled on the ground, claimed to have mistaken him for a man who attacked and killed an Israeli soldier at a bus station in the southern city of Beersheba.

“It’s terrible. It shows you what a terrible situation we are in,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon.

However, daily newspaper Yediot Ahronot made clear in its headline that the Eritrean refugee had been shot “just because of his skin colour.”

Soroka Medical Centre deputy general director Dr Nitza Neuman-Heiman said that Mr Zerhom had arrived at the hospital in a “very serious condition” and had succumbed to gunshot wounds to the abdomen and injuries sustained during the lynch-mob attack.

Mr Zerhom was in Beersheba to renew his Israeli visa, said Sagi Malachi, his employer at a plant nursery.

About 34,000 Eritreans have sought asylum in Israel, fleeing persecution and conflict at home.

Israel does not grant them refugee status, but it does not deport them to Eritrea so as not to endanger their lives.

Migrants must renew Israeli visas every month or two.

“The death of an asylum-seeker at the hands of security guards and an angry mob is a tragic but foreseeable outgrowth of a climate in which some Israeli politicians encourage citizens to take the law into their own hands,” said Sari Bashi of Human Rights Watch.

Mr Zerhom’s killing followed that of an Israeli soldier and the wounding of nine other people by Mohannad al-Okbi, an Arab citizen of Israel from the Bedouin town of Hura. He was shot dead.

Palestinians in Israeli-occupied Jerusalem awoke to a new reality yesterday, with troops encircling their neighbourhoods, blocking roads with concrete cubes the size of washing machines and ordering men leaving on foot to lift their shirts to show that they were not carrying knives.

The government said the measures were temporary and akin to what any police department in the US or Europe would do to quell urban unrest.