2 West Bank minors sent to house arrest, but not charged

Two settler youths detained early Tuesday morning in the northern West Bank were sent to house arrest for four months.

The two, both minors, are suspected of membership in an extreme right-wing organization and of involvement in acts of violence against Palestinians.

According to the Shin Bet security service, the two detainees were involved in violent actions against Palestinians.

OC Central Command Maj.-Gen. Roni Numa and Home Front commander Yoel Strick signed the arrest papers at the recommendation of the Shin Bet.

According to the terms of their detention, the two youths will not be allowed near the West Bank or Jerusalem for a year and will have to live in their parents’ homes for six months. They will not be allowed to go outside at night and are also barred from speaking on the phone with several of their friends, presumably other members of the right-wing groups they allegedly belong to.

The arrests come just after Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon approved long-term detention without trial for several suspected Israeli extremist activists, a procedure until now employed almost exclusively against Palestinian suspects.

The procedure, known as administrative detention, allows the police or a military court to detain an individual for an extended period of detention either in their home or in jail without producing the evidence needed to charge them.

Israel has been moving to crack down on Jewish extremists after the killing of a Palestinian baby, Ali Dawabsha, in a firebomb attack on his home in the West Bank village of Duma. The baby’s father, Sa’ad Dawabsha, died of his wounds on Saturday, His mother and 4-year-old brother are being treated for severe burns at the Tel Hashomer hospital near Tel Aviv.

The attack, coupled with a fatal stabbing spree by an extremist ultra-Orthodox man at Jerusalem’s gay pride parade a day earlier, sparked an international and domestic outcry over Israel’s failure to come to grips with violence by hardline Jews.

While some hailed the move to arrest violent settlers, many rights groups lamented the fact that what they call a violation of basic human rights, until now used widely against Palestinians, has been used to target Israelis, too.

According to human rights group B’Tselem, there were 370 Palestinians held in administrative detention as of mid-June this year. The number reached a peak of over 1,000 in 2002. At its lowest it was just under 250. The data from B’Tselem was published before administrative detention was approved against Jewish extremists.

Judah Ari Gross contributed to this report.