The city of Lod begins after the roundabout on the outskirts of Ben Gurion International Airport.

Broken windows at the bus stop.

A burnt out car in the parking lot.

Charred remains of a barricade.

Then comes the Maoz Torah School next to an academy that prepares for military service.

The blue paint is blackened with soot around the windows on the first floor.

Security forces of the paramilitary border police stand in front of the fence next to their armored vehicles.

The academy is located in a Palestinian residential area to which more and more Jews have moved in recent years for ideological reasons.

Seventy percent of the residents in the Ramat Eschkol district near the old town still have an Arab background.

Jochen Stahnke

Political correspondent for Israel, the Palestinian Territories and Jordan based in Tel Aviv.

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    A family festival is taking place in the courtyard today.

    Children slide down an inflatable slide, there is a buffet with pastries, plastic cups and soft drinks in front of the entrance, from which men walk in and out with crocheted kippahs and pistols on their belts.

    "We can't sleep, there is always shooting around us," says Tsofia Dreyfuss, 37, at the table in front of the slide.

    "My neighbors on the same floor are Arabs, we never harmed them," she says while some of her seven children are playing around her.

    "We lived under the belief that the Arabs like us," says Dreyfuss, "but not really anymore."

    Open street battles

    After the riots in Jerusalem, violence has escalated in many mixed places in Israel, and it was particularly bad in Lod, a city of eighty thousand people with a total of thirty percent Arab population. They are descendants of the several hundred out of tens of thousands of Palestinians who were not expelled from the city in 1948.

    Last week, Arab citizens demonstrated, among other things, against the police operations in the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. A youth climbed a pole in Lod and attached a Palestinian flag to it. This drove some Jewish residents to white heat, and open street battles broke out during the night. A Jewish Israeli shot and killed 32-year-old Moussa Hassouna in front of the mosque square. Recordings show how he was in a group that threw stones at the houses of alleged Jewish residents. Then Hassouna was struck down without the shooter being seen. Israeli media reported self-defense until prosecutors ordered three arrests and investigators said that given the distance of the shots, self-defense was ruled out.

    The following day, when the deceased was to be laid out in the mosque and then carried to the cemetery, the funeral procession turned into another demonstration. On the way from the mosque to the cemetery stood the national religious with Israeli flags, as well as the border police. There was mutual abuse and abuse, and the security forces dispersed the Arab demonstrators with tear gas. "Only twenty people made it to the cemetery with the body," says Maha Elnakib, who was on the Lod city council until a few years ago. "Thousands had initially accompanied the funeral procession." Then the clashes escalated further. During the night, Arab youths attacked Jewish drivers with stones, one of which was badly hit in the head.This Monday, Yigal Yehoshua succumbed to his injuries.

    Thugs from the Jewish settler and hooligan scene

    On the third day, thugs from the Jewish settler and hooligan scene drove to Lod in several buses to take part in street fighting and set cars on fire, says Elnakib.

    The hooligans stood in line on the streets and checked who was an Arab, and then covered these cars with stones.

    Tsofia Dreyfuss also criticizes the hooligans.

    “We don't want groups that come here to take part in rioting.

    Because it is us who will have to live with the Arabs tomorrow. "

    Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu then appeared in Lod at around 2 a.m. on Wednesday night. Pale and tired, he promised: "We will restore order and quiet with an iron fist." The authorities imposed an emergency and a night curfew and moved a large number of border police into the city.