'He Deliberately Pressed the Accelerator': Haifa Footballer Haim Sirotkin Gets One-Year Prison Term for Running Over Protesters in Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday sentenced former footballer Haim Sirotkin, 56, to one year in prison for the offense of reckless and negligent conduct in a vehicle, after he ran over protesters against the government in Tel Aviv in April 2024. In addition, his driver’s license was revoked for four years, and the court ordered him to pay compensation of 20,000 shekels to one of the victims and 4,000 shekels to each of four additional victims.

The incident took place in the evening on April 6, 2024, when Sirotkin was driving a car also carrying his wife and a couple of friends, on their way to a party. When they reached the intersection of Namir Boulevard, Begin Road and King Saul Street in Tel Aviv, the junction was crowded with protesters crossing through it. The defendant stopped his car, and he and his wife exchanged words with protesters who passed near the vehicle. At some point, precisely when a police officer who had offered to guide him and help him leave the intersection was not by his side, the defendant pressed the car’s accelerator hard and crossed the intersection while striking five protesters and injuring them. One of the victims, about 60 years old, suffered a head injury and four broken ribs. After crossing the intersection, the defendant continued driving for more than 10 seconds before stopping his car.

The prosecution did not argue in the indictment or at trial that the defendant drove as he did in order to harm the protesters, but rather that he drove recklessly, meaning with indifference or disregard for the consequences of his driving. The prosecution attributed to him a mental element beyond negligence, but not actual intent. The defense, for its part, did not stand by the defendant’s original claim at trial that he ran over the protesters because of a malfunction in his car that prevented him from controlling it, and from this it followed that the manner in which the car drove was a direct result of how it was operated by the defendant.

The evidence presented at trial did not allow the court to determine with certainty why the defendant, who was not in a hurry because of any emergency, drove in the reckless and negligent manner he did, and to what extent his behavior was influenced by each of the following factors: his irritation over the delay on the road, his anger at remarks made by a female protester who passed near the car and said something that angered him, the court did not accept the defendant’s claim regarding the content of the remark, his generally negative attitude toward protesters, pressure from his wife’s shouts, the alcohol he had drunk, the issue of alcohol consumption was investigated in a way that did not allow firm conclusions and was not even mentioned as a circumstance in the indictment, and a reckless attitude toward the possibility that he would harm protesters. The court also ruled that some of his actions may have been the result of an unintentional failure to operate the vehicle properly, stemming from a combination of these factors and possibly others as well.

The court said that the combination of three aggravating circumstances in this case requires the imposition of a prison sentence despite the fact that no intentional harm to the protesters was attributed to the defendant. The first circumstance is that this was not a case of negligence alone, but rather a case in which the defendant knowingly pressed the accelerator while many people stood in front of his car, and when the police officer who had offered to help him leave the intersection was not guiding him, but instead was occupied speaking with the defendant’s wife, who was confronting protesters. The second circumstance is the number of victims and the severity of the injury to one of them, and the third circumstance, which was also given some weight, is the connection between the defendant’s impatience, which led him not to wait for the protesters to finish crossing but to drive through them dangerously, and the lack of tolerance expressed in the earlier confrontation between the car’s occupants and the protesters.