Sharks drew crowds who swam with them off Israel's coast

HADERA, Israel (AP) — Israeli police on Tuesday were scouring the coast for a swimmer they fear may have been attacked by a shark in an area that has long seen close encounters between marine predators and beachgoers who sometimes seek them out.

A shiver of endangered dusky and sandbar sharks has been swimming close to the area for years, attracting onlookers who approach the sharks, drawing pleas from conservation groups for authorities to separate people from the wild animals.

Nature groups say those warnings went unheeded. On Monday, police launched a search along the Mediterranean coast after reports that a shark attacked a swimmer on a beach near the city of Hadera.

On Tuesday, the beach was closed off as search teams used boats and underwater equipment to look for the man. His identity was not immediately known, but Israeli media said he had gone to swim with the sharks.

Israelis flocked in large numbers to the beach during a weeklong holiday, sharing the waters with a dozen or more sharks. Some tugged on the sharks’ fins, while others threw them fish to eat. Dusky sharks can stretch 4 meters (13 feet) long and weigh about 350 kilograms (750 pounds). Sandbar sharks are smaller, growing to about 2.5 meters (8 feet) and 100 kilograms (220 pounds).

Yigael Ben-Ari, head of marine rangers at the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, said it was not known how the man behaved around the sharks. But he said the public should know not to enter the water when sharks are present and not to touch or play with them.

One video shared by Israeli media showed a shark swimming right up to bathers in thigh-deep water.

“What a huge shark!” the man filming exclaims, as the shark approaches him. “Whoa! He’s coming toward us!”

“Don’t move!” he implores a boy standing nearby, who replies: “I’m leaving.”

The man then asks: “What, are you afraid of the sharks?”

The behavior, some of which was witnessed by an Associated Press photographer two days before the attack, flew in the face of the advice of the parks authority.

“Like every wild animal, the sharks’ behavior may be unpredictable,” the authority said in a statement.

This would be just the third recorded shark attack in Israel, according to Ben-Ari. One person was killed in an attack in the 1940s.

The area, where warm water released by a nearby power plant flows into the sea, has for years attracted dozens of sharks between October and May. Ben-Ari said swimming is prohibited in the area, but swimmers enter the water anyway.

“It would have been appropriate to take steps to preserve and regulate public safety, but over the years, chaos has developed in the area,” the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, an environmental group, said in a statement.

It said fishermen, boats, divers, surfers and snorkelers intersected dangerously with a wild animal that “is not accustomed to being around crowds of people.”

SPNI said further steps were needed to prevent similar incidents, like designating a safe zone from where people could view the sharks without swimming close to them.

Israeli authorities on Monday closed the beach and others nearby.

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Goldenberg reported from Jerusalem.