Vandals slash car tyres in east Jerusalem

Vandals slashed the tyres of six cars in an Arab neighbourhood of east Jerusalem, a police spokeswoman said on Tuesday morning, in an apparent racist attack. "The tyres of six cars belonging to Arabs were found slashed in Beit Safafa," police spokeswoman Luba Samri said in a statement. "The words 'price tag' and 'revenge' were spray-painted onto some of them," she wrote. "Price tag" is the name used for Jewish extremist hate crimes that generally target Arabs. Unknown assailants threw a Molotov cocktail at a Roman Catholic monastery in Israel last week and scrawled Hebrew graffiti on its walls, reading "Gentiles perish" and "revenge". Initially carried out against Palestinians in retaliation for state moves to dismantle unauthorised settler outposts, price tag attacks have become a much broader phenomenon with racist and xenophobic overtones. The Israeli cabinet has defined "price tag" suspects as part of "unlawful organisations", stopping short of the original justice ministry proposal to call their acts "terrorism".