More than half of Israeli children say they have been bullied at school and almost one in five are bullied at home, according to a new poll.
In an exclusive poll by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), more than a third of Israeli schoolchildren and one in six parents are worried about their children being bullied in public or school, the institute said on Sunday.
“There is a fear that there will be attacks, attacks on our children, and that this will cause the violence to be seen and felt, the poll found,” the institute’s chairman, Uri Avnery, told AFP news agency.
The poll was carried out among 1,500 children and parents of children attending Israeli schools, who were asked whether they have seen bullying at school or whether they worry about it at home.
The IDI’s findings came as a court in Jerusalem convicted four people, including a Palestinian man who killed a teacher and wounded another, for the fatal stabbing of the teacher in the West Bank city of Hebron.
The trial was also the second in Israel in the past two weeks in which a Palestinian attacker was convicted.
Earlier on Sunday, the Israeli Supreme Court convicted a 26-year-old Palestinian who shot and wounded a policeman outside the main synagogue in Jerusalem’s Old City on Saturday, after a court heard he had been under a surveillance order since 2015.
The Palestinian, Naim Abu Khdeir, was sentenced to life in prison for murder and attempted murder in connection with the shooting, in which the policeman was shot in the chest and abdomen.
The case has shaken Israel’s relations with the United States, which had sought to pressure Israel to extradite him.
