Justice Ministry probes arrest of women who placed hostage flyers at Likud MK’s synagogue
Women questioned for breaking and entering, but CCTV shows them walking into open synagogue; one says she was arrested, cuffed in front of her kids; protesters rally; Edelstein silent
The Justice Ministry’s Department of Internal Police Investigations (DIPI) announced Saturday that it had launched a probe into an incident in which three women were arrested for placing leaflets on seats at MK Yuli Edelstein’s synagogue calling for the release of hostages held in Gaza.
The women were questioned on suspicions including breaking and entering, but security footage showed that the synagogue was open when they entered to place the leaflets on congregants’ seats. One of the three said she was arrested and handcuffed at home in front of her young children.
Police said earlier Saturday that “in light of the allegations” about the case’s handling, new police chief Daniel Levy had ordered a probe into the arresting officers’ conduct.
But Kan news said that probe would be halted now that DIPI had announced its own investigation.
A spokesperson for the State Prosecutor’s Office told The Times of Israel that multiple probes into the same incident “usually” don’t continue in parallel, appearing to indicate the police probe is likely to close.
Amid growing public anger over the arrests, a column of protesters trailed Edelstein — a lawmaker from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party — as he walked to synagogue on Saturday morning.
The demonstrators waved Israeli flags and shouted “shame” and “forsaker of Zion.” The chant was a reference to the fact that the Likud lawmaker was a Prisoner of Zion — a Jewish refusenik jailed in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
The Detainee Support Organization, which represents arrested anti-government activists, released a video of protesters shouting “abandoner” and “shame” as Edelstein, who chairs the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, exited the synagogue.
אז מה המעצר המטומטם של 3 נשים ששמו כרוזים עם "שלח את עמי" בבית הכנסת של יולי אדלשטיין השיג אתמול?
חוץ מהעמקת התובנה שהמשטרה הפכה לכלי דיכוי בסגנון הבסיג' של עבריין אלים ומסית סידרתי?
המעצר השיג ליולי אדלשטיין "ליווי" של מאות אזרחים בדרך לבית הכנסת היום.
לא מיותר? יש איזה מטומטם… pic.twitter.com/N99XUlI5eo— Ben Caspit בן כספית (@BenCaspit) September 14, 2024
Edelstein, who is religiously observant, did not address the protesters outside the synagogue.
Nor has he commented on the arrests, which were made several hours before the Sabbath started at sundown.
The Detainee Support Organization said prominent anti-government activist Moshe Radman was ordered to the Glilot Police Station for questioning on suspicion he attacked a civil servant during the protest. There was no comment from police.
The arrested women had been taken to that same police station near Herzliya on Friday, where they were interrogated for eight hours. Dozens protested outside until the women were set free. According to Haaretz, one of the arrested women is 47, and the other two are in their 60s.
“It’s insane. I have no other word… We’re in the State of Israel, the country of the Jewish people. I went with my friends to a synagogue, a place of prayer for Jews, where everyone can go, ” one of the three women, Idit Alexandrovich, told Channel 12 news on Saturday. “We distributed flyers for the hostages, calling to ‘Let My People Go’. What could be more Jewish than that? The synagogue was open. We went in. We put the leaflets on the seats. We left, via the main entrance, there were people around, and went home, happily hoping that maybe we’d done something that could help bring the hostages home.”
Alexandrovich went on: “And then, look at what Israel Police busies itself with. Yesterday, Friday afternoon, two police officers — a man and a woman — came to my home. I wasn’t home. I have four young kids. They called from the phone of my almost-nine-year-old and said the police are waiting at my home… waiting to arrest me.”
When she got home, she said, the officers told her, in front of her children, that she was “being arrested for breaking and entering and conspiracy to commit a crime… I was put in handcuffs. I was taken to the patrol car.” There, her feet were also cuffed, she said.
At the police station, she waited hours to be questioned, and then the police changed the allegations to trespassing, she said, “which is also false; the synagogue is open to everyone…”
How, Alexandrovich asked, could it possibly be a crime to distribute leaflets in a synagogue urging the release of the hostages? “And for that, they arrested me, in front of my children?” she said.
She said the arrest was “plainly political,” and that she would not be intimidated. “This is my country… I’m battling for the future of my children in this country.”
The women were released on restrictive conditions, including a restraining order to stay away from Edelstein and the synagogue.
They were initially released to five days of house arrest. However, police reduced the period to two days before scrapping it altogether.
Police also changed the allegations against the women from breaking and entering to trespassing, and from conspiracy to commit a crime to conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor, according to the Detainee Support Organization.
Israeli criminal law puts trespassing into a house of worship, or entering one with intent to commit a crime, on par with trespassing into a private home.
Both acts carry up to five years in prison, and up to seven years in case the perpetrator broke into the premises.
תיעוד ש @JoshBreiner ואני מביאים של הנחת תמונות החטופים בבית הכנסת אוהל משה בהרצליה, המקום פתוח, אחת הפעילות נכנסת פנימה, פותחת דלת צדדית וממנה נכנסות השלוש לשים את הפליירים על כסאות בית הכנסת. שווה שמונה שעות בתחנה?
הפעילות השתחררו למעצר בית והרחקה מבית הכנסת ואדלשטיין pic.twitter.com/Sth7acdRHU
— Bar Peleg (@bar_peleg) September 13, 2024
Ran Tagar, who is representing the three women, rejected the police’s allegation that the women had broken into the synagogue, telling Ynet that the women had entered “an open synagogue while there was a Bar Mitzvah” inside.
“I haven’t the words to describe the repulsion at the police’s conduct,” Tagar told Ynet. “It’s obvious this arrest is political.”
Meanwhile, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum applauded the women and slammed the “exclusion of the hostage issue from the public sphere.”
On Thursday, the women placed the leaflets on chairs in the synagogue where Edelstein worships.
Under the caption “Let my people go,” the flyers showed 4-year-old Ariel Bibas and his 1-year-old brother Kfir, as well as four female soldiers, all six of whom were among the 251 people abducted when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill nearly 1,200 people, sparking the war in Gaza.
In the flyer’s center was a picture of Edelstein from when he was held in a Soviet jail for teaching Hebrew in the 1980s.
The arrests came a week after Noa Goldenberg, 27, was detained for allegedly tossing sand at National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir on a Tel Aviv beach. That incident also sparked protests and allegations of police politicization.
Ben Gvir, who assumed his position in late 2022, has reportedly ordered the police to refrain from arresting right-wing extremists who attacked trucks bringing humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip amid the war there.
Police have also failed to make any arrests in several recent instances of settler violence in the West Bank, and in the case of right-wing mobs that stormed two army bases on July 29 after ten reservists were detained on suspicion of having sodomized a Palestinian prisoner.
However, dozens have been arrested at protests calling for a hostage deal and elections.
