© Alon Ron/HaaretzShalom Domrani, the reputed head of the prominent Israeli crime family the Domrani organisation, in court.
City of Ashkelon is rocked by car bombs targeting crime family as businesses associated with mobsters are bulldozedSimon was standing in his shop in sight of Ashkelon's football stadium when he heard the bomb go off.
At first, said Simon - who declined to give his surname - he thought it was a Palestinian missile from Gaza, a short distance along the coast. "I shut the shop and smoked a cigarette to calm myself," he said. After a few minutes, puzzled he had not heard the air-raid siren, he stuck his head out of his door to see the flaming shell of a car. Its passenger, and the target of the blast, was a member of prominent Israeli crime organisation the Domrani family.
The car bomb on Ort Street, close to a school, was not a solitary incident. In the space of a fortnight spanning the final week of October and the beginning of this month, two car bombs detonated in the southern port city, both targeting Domrani family members.
Ashkelon is not the only Israeli town to be rocked by mob violence this year. On 7 November, a device attached to the car of a prominent state prosecutor, well-known for pursuing Israel's crime families, detonated in Tel Aviv.
This rise in incidents has inspired a fierce debate that reached a climax last week with a
call from Israel's hawkish public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, for the use of anti-terror tactics usually reserved for Palestinian militants - including administrative detention - against Jewish Israeli crime families. As he made his call, several high-profile arrests took place and a number of businesses associated with mobsters were bulldozed in Ashkelon.
Comment: This whole privacy issue seems to be a bit of a red herring. The psychopathic insurance companies would be the most damaged by allowing cameras in nursing homes. Their tort liability would increase exponentially. Funny how that is NOT mentioned. Cui bono.