JERUSALEM (JTA) — Jerusalem police arrested a suspect in the vandalism and bomb threat at the city’s offices of Peace Now.
The suspect — a 21-year-old from Mevasseret Zion, a Jerusalem neighborhood — had been arrested previously for threatening the head of Peace Now, Yariv Oppenheimer, and is believed to have been involved in other acts of vandalism, according to Ynet.
On Sunday evening, police evacuated the two-story building housing the Jerusalem offices of Peace Now after a man speaking into the building’s intercom system reportedly said that the building would soon blow up.
The words "price tag" were discovered spray-painted on the side of the building the same evening. A Star of David had been spray-painted on the building a few days ago.
Price tag refers to the strategy that extremist settlers have adopted to exact a price in attacks on Palestinians and Arabs in retribution for settlement freezes and demolitions or for Palestinian attacks on Jews.
Police also are investigating whether the suspect was involved in the attack Monday night on the home of Hagit Ofran, the director of Peace Now’s Settlement Watch project. Graffiti painted on her building and in the stairwell included swastikas and the words "Rabin is waiting for you," referring to the assassination of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that took place in November 1995. Other epithets referred to the recent razing of structures in two West Bank outposts.
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