Tension rises .. Israeli spit on the Polish ambassador

Was on Wednesday before an Israeli court in Tel Aviv that was stopped by police for spitting at the Polish ambassador. The court decided to put him under house arrest for two days, in an incident that increased tensions between the two countries.

Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said Polish ambassador Marek Magirovsky was sitting in his car Tuesday in Tel Aviv when a man approached him and "spit on him."

Rosenfeld added that police arrested the man, from Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, and detained him. The defendant appeared on Wednesday before the court, which decided to put him under house arrest Wednesday and Thursday.

"The court also ordered him not to approach the Polish embassy for 30 days," Rosenfeld said.

In Warsaw, Polish Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Ewa Swara said that Israel's ambassador to Poland, Anna Azari, had been summoned to the Polish Foreign Ministry on the background of the incident.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Moravitsky described what happened as a "racist attack and hostile act of xenophobia". "Violence against diplomats or other citizens should not be tolerated," he wrote on Twitter.

The incident came a day after Poland canceled a planned visit by Israeli officials because of their intention to raise the issue of the return of Jewish property confiscated during the Holocaust, in a file that Poland considers closed.

Hundreds of demonstrators marched in Warsaw on Saturday to protest against a US law on compensation for Jewish property confiscated during and after the Second World War, an issue that is gaining increasing importance in the country's election campaigns.

Last year, Poland passed a law banning Poles or the state from complicity in Nazi war crimes, and the move provoked condemnation in Israel.

In February, Israel's Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, angered Poland by saying that "Poles are feeding anti-Semitism with their mothers' milk."