Erdan: Still not enough proof to charge suspected Jewish terrorists

Investigators still don’t have enough evidence to press charges against the suspects arrested in connection to the deadly firebombing of a Palestinian home in July, Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan said Friday.

Police and Shin Bet security service agents recently arrested multiple Jewish terror suspects who may have been involved in the fatal firebombing of the Dawabsha family home in the West Bank village of Duma, officials said Thursday. They said investigators were checking “concrete suspicions” that they were involved in the deadly attack.

Suspected Jewish extremists torched the Dawabsha home on July 31 while the family slept. Ali Dawabsha, the family’s 18-month old son, died in the attack; his parents, Saad and Riham, succumbed to their injuries in Israeli hospitals in the aftermath of the attack.

“There are not many investigations that have as high a priority as that of the murder that was carried out in the village of Duma, and still the Shin Bet and police are advancing in this investigation,” Erdan said in an interview with Army Radio on Friday morning.

Erdan laid out some of the challenges facing investigators trying to probe the extremist Jewish group believed behind the attack, noting that its members didn’t use cell phones, were not in contact with their families, and lived on remote hilltops in the West Bank.

“We’re doing everything we can for us to have evidence that will allow us to bring justice and to press charges.”

Details of the investigation, including the identities of the suspects, remained under a gag order, the police said in a statement on Thursday. According to a Haaretz report, suspects currently in police custody were already on a Shin Bet watchlist before the attack took place.

The arrests took place “over the past few days,” the officials said without providing additional details.

Israeli officials had been criticized for failing to collar any suspects in the deadly attack, which drew local and international condemnation, with some alleging a double standard in the state’s handling of cases involving Jewish and Palestinian terror.

The aftermath of the attack brought a crackdown on Jewish extremists in the West Bank — known as Hilltop Youth — and saw the first use of administrative detention, in which suspects are arrested and held without charge, against Jewish terror suspects.

One of those arrested and still being held was Meir Ettinger, grandson of late extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, though it’s not clear if he is linked to the Duma attack.

On Wednesday, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process called on Israel’s law enforcement agencies to increase efforts to conclude their investigation into the Duma terror attack.

“Four months have passed since the arson attack against the Dawabsha family in the village of Duma in the occupied West Bank,” said the statement from the office of Nickolay Mladenov.

The “brutal killing” of Ali and his parents was “a tragedy that has angered Palestinians and shocked Israelis,” the statement said.

Mladenov said he was “concerned” by the “slow progress” of the investigation, and called on Israeli authorities “to move swiftly in bringing the perpetrators of this terrible crime to justice.”