4th Israeli arrested in security-related probe, barred from counsel
Police on Sunday arrested a fourth Israeli suspect in a security-related investigation that remains under gag order, a law enforcement official confirmed.
The 28-year-old resident of Mevasseret Zion was arrested in nearby Abu Ghosh and has since been barred from meeting with an attorney — a tactic sometimes employed by police while probing what it says are urgent security cases.
The arrest follows one on Friday in which an 18-year-old from the Modi’in area was nabbed at Ben Gurion Airport while on his way to Uman, the burial site of Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, a police official said. Two other teens, aged 18 and 15, were arrested a day earlier on suspicion of involvement in the same security-related investigation.
The two 18-year-olds have been barred from meeting with an attorney, but their lawyers, from the Honenu legal aid organization — known for representing Jewish terror suspects — have petitioned the Supreme Court against the order.
The four suspects were slated to be brought before judges later Sunday for remand hearings.
Separately last week, a pair of teens were arrested in Bat Ayin on charges of assaulting two police officers. According to their attorney Moshe Polski — also from Honenu — the officers were disguised as Palestinian workers.
Polski claimed that the officers had been acting strangely, thus raising his clients’ suspicions. Moreover, the attorney pointed out that the ostensible Palestinian workers should not have been in the settlement to begin with, because Bat Ayin has a strict policy against hiring non-Jews. In November, a Palestinian bus driver was assaulted during stops in Bat Ayin, leading the Egged public transportation company to briefly cease its services in the community, which is in the Etzion bloc, south of Jerusalem.
A security official told The Times of Israel then that there had been a notable increase in settler violence targeting Palestinians surrounding the Bat Ayin settlement in recent weeks.
These included a so-called price tag attack in neighboring Jab’a, in which the perpetrators vandalized vehicles and graffitied Hebrew phrases, including “Revenge for Bat Ayin,” in an incident days after security forces razed a structure in an illegal outpost near the flashpoint settlement.
The security official said that many of those involved in the latest spate of violence had come from the outposts surrounding another flashpoint settlement — Yitzhar in the northern West Bank.
In October, the IDF declared the Kumi Ori outpost southwest of Yitzhar a closed military zone, following several incidents of violence in which residents targeted neighboring Palestinians, as well as security forces dispatched to protect them.
Due to the increased military presence in the northern West Bank, some of the hilltop youth, as they are known, traveled south to the Bat Ayin area, the security official explained.
He added that the current situation in the West Bank was reminiscent of the lead-up to the 2015 firebombing of the Dawabsha family home in the village of Duma, a terror attack that killed a couple and their baby.