People swim next to a Sandbar shark in the Mediterranean Sea near the northern Israeli coastal city of Hadera, in a Nov. 22, 2022 file photo. MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP/Getty

Israeli police on Tuesday were scouring the waters off the country's Mediterranean coast for a swimmer who they fear may have been attacked by a shark, in an area that for decades has 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 and drawing pleas from conservation groups for authorities to separate people from the wild animals.

Nature groups say those warnings went unheeded and, on Monday, police were forced to launch a search after receiving reports that a swimmer was attacked by a shark on a beach near the Israeli city of Hadera. The beach near Hadera was closed off on Tuesday as search teams scoured the sea by boat and underwater equipment for the swimmer. The man's 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.

Yigael Ben-Ari, head of the Israel's Parks and Nature Authority's marine ranger force, said it was unknown how the man believed to have been attacked had behaved around the sharks, but the public had a responsibility to recognize that it shouldn't enter the waters and definitely should not touch or play with the sharks.

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 Parks and Nature Authority's advice not to approach the sharks.

"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 the months of 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 wild animals that are "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.

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