Two Chinese nationals were briefly detained by police on Friday after onlookers caught them placing ducks into a large black bag at the Ramat Gan National Park. Local outlet News3 and Israel Hayom carried different versions of the same incident; together they paint a fuller picture than either does on its own.
What the two reports say#
Per News3, eyewitnesses noticed the pair behaving suspiciously near the park’s lake, watched them load two ducks into a black bag they had brought with them, and called police. Officers from Ramat Gan station detained the two men on suspicion of theft of the birds, with police reportedly suspecting they intended to take the ducks for food. Because the suspects spoke only Chinese, investigators had to wait for an interpreter to arrive before they could question them. The men told the interpreter they had only wanted to “adopt” the ducks, and were released after questioning.
Israel Hayom, reporting the same incident, says the two were spotted by park rangers on a routine patrol rather than by civilians, describes them as Chinese workers, and frames the detention as a brief questioning before release.
The reports do not fully reconcile — including on the basic question of whether the men were tourists or labour migrants — and neither news outlet has named or quoted the suspects directly.
A wider pattern at the park#
Buried in News3’s report is a detail that makes the incident harder to dismiss as a one-off cultural misunderstanding: regular visitors say that in recent weeks roughly 84 ducks have gone missing from the lake area. If accurate, that is a substantial loss from the park’s resident waterfowl population, and changes the policing calculus around what would otherwise look like an isolated, vaguely comic episode.
Israel Nature and Parks Authority (רשות הטבע והגנים) inspectors have not, as of writing, publicly linked the detained pair to those disappearances.
The legal context#
Wildlife in Israeli national parks is protected under the National Parks, Nature Reserves, National Sites and Memorial Sites Law (1998) and the Wildlife Protection Law (1955). Removing, harming, or feeding animals in a national park is prohibited, and offences are enforced by Nature and Parks Authority inspectors, who hold powers of detention. Penalties range from fines to criminal prosecution depending on intent and scale.
The rules apply equally to residents, tourists, and foreign workers. Park signage is primarily in Hebrew and English, and the underlying premise — that ordinary-looking ducks at a city park are protected wildlife the public is not allowed to touch — is not necessarily intuitive to visitors arriving from very different legal and cultural frameworks.
Cultural footnote#
Ramat Gan National Park is, with some irony, home to a small population of Mandarin ducks (ברווז המנדרין הסיני) — a species native to East Asia and historically associated in Chinese culture with marital fidelity. The reports do not specify whether the birds taken from the bag were Mandarin ducks or the much more common mallards that dominate the lake; for now, that detail is missing from the public record.
Communication and community#
The need to wait for a Chinese interpreter is a recurring issue in Israeli law-enforcement contacts with Chinese nationals — whether tourists, students, or the large population of construction workers brought in on tied employer visas. Police stations in Gush Dan do not routinely staff Chinese-language officers; community advocates and the Chinese embassy have raised this in the past in the context of labour disputes and traffic incidents.
For anyone newly arrived in Israel, the takeaway is straightforward: the friendly-looking ducks at a national park are not yours to take home, however hospitable they look. For Israeli authorities and the park, the more pressing question is what happened to the other 80-odd birds.
Sources: News3, Israel Hayom
