The Washington Post reports:

As bands of Jewish and Arab citizens fought one another and police in towns across Israel for a third night early Thursday, Israelis worried that the battle inside the country may be harder to stop than the air war still being waged with Gaza.

Chaos erupted in Israeli cities with mixed Jewish-Arab populations on Wednesday night, marking an escalation in the country’s worst communal violence in two decades. The Israeli media and local residents alike have warned about the threat of civil war in the country, even as Israel and Hamas have been engaged in the most intense exchange of rockets and bombs since the 2014 Gaza war.

In some cases, Arab Israelis protesting in support of Palestinians in Gaza and Jerusalem have squared off against right-wing Jewish Israelis and police, and these confrontations have sparked riots and looting. In other cases, groups of vigilante Jews have marched through Arab areas, targeting shops and individuals with violence. And in yet other cases, Arabs have attacked Jews passing through Arab neighborhoods.

Video shot in the central Israeli town of Bat Yam showed Jewish nationalists pulling a man, whom they believed to be Arab, from a car and brutally beating him on the street. The Israeli media described the incident as “an attempted lynching in prime time.” The man was admitted to a Tel Aviv hospital with serious injuries, according to the Associated Press.

In the coastal city of Acre, Arabs critically injured a Jewish man with rocks and iron bars, and then the crowd attacked the ambulance taking him to the hospital, the AP reported.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said his government would begin using administrative detention — imprisonment without formal charge — against those involved in civil unrest. Human rights groups have criticized Israel’s broad use of it against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. [Continue reading…]