Gilad Erdan
Gilad ErdanYonatan Sindel/Flash90

Minister of Internal Security Gilad Erdan, who is in charge Israel's police force, has no doubt that the lethal arson attack in the Arab village of Duma before dawn Friday was committed by Jews.

The Cabinet decision Sunday to allow administrative detention of Jewish suspects in terrorism will not deter the kind of person who carried out the attack in Duma, he told Kol Yisrael radio Monday. The people who carry out such attacks are “extremist anarchistic religious” Jews, he said, who do not accept the laws of the land and its sovereignty.

Erdan's statement joins his more carefully worded initial statement Friday, according to which “indications are that the attack was committed by Jews.”

Security forces assumed from the outset that Jews were behind the attack, because of Hebrew graffiti scrawled by the perpetrators at the scene of the attack. However, some people suspect that the arson was committed by Arabs, and that they are the ones who drew the graffiti in order to place suspicion on Jews.

He added, though, that the Cabinet's decisions on tougher measures against Jewish terrorism will give security forces the tools to handle Jewish terror just as they handle Arab terror.

Unlike the Duma incident, Erdan said, the murder at the gay pride parade Thursday could have been prevented. He noted that a team has been appointed to look into how Yishai Shlissel was allowed to come near the parade despite the fact that he had recently been freed from jail for stabbing participants in the same parade ten years ago.