Ya’alon: Israel lacks evidence for conviction in fatal Duma firebombing

After 101 days, Israeli law-enforcement officials still don’t have enough evidence to indict the Jewish extremists who firebombed a Palestinian home, killing three members of the same family, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon announced Monday.

Last month, Ya’alon announced the Shin Bet security service and Israel Police knew which right-wing extremist group carried out the July attack on the Dawabsha family in the village of Duma, but didn’t have enough evidence about the identities of the perpetrators to convict.

The firebombing killed 18-month-old Ali Dawabsha and mortally injured his parents, who died in the following weeks.

The deaths prompted outrage among the Palestinians, in Israel and across the international community. Ali’s four-year-old brother survived the attack, which was widely attributed to Jewish extremists.

Critics have taken Israeli officials to task for failing to produce an indictment in the case thus far, pointing to it as proof of a double standard for Jewish and Palestinian terrorists.

Ya’alon said the military has resorted to jailing suspects without charge — under a practice known as administrative detention — in lieu of solid evidence against them.

“Once we discovered which group was responsible for the incident, and we realized that we were unable to bring them to justice, we opted for house arrests and administrative detentions,” he said, using Israel’s technical term for imprisonments without trial or formal charges.

“I hope that soon we will solve [the case] completely,” Ya’alon added.

Administrative detentions are a controversial law-enforcement tool, in which suspects can be held without trial for a variety of reasons, including to avoid disclosing intelligence. The practice, though denounced by some as a violation of civil rights, has been in use against Palestinian suspects for years and was approved last month — at Ya’alon’s request — for use against Jewish Israelis as well.

“The group responsible is made up of Jewish fanatics who want a religious kingdom and regime based on Jewish law,” Ya’alon told reporters.

Though the guilty parties have not been formally arrested and indicted, the defense minister pointed out that there have not been any serious attacks by Jewish extremists against Palestinians in the months since the Dawabsha murders, other than small-scale vandalism and petty violence.

Russian plane brought down by bomb

Ya’alon also addressed the recent crash of a Russian airliner over Sinai, confirming that it was an attack, but refusing to discuss claims that Israel provided the intelligence that pointed to a bomb as the cause of the crash.

“We understand with a high degree of certainty that this was an attack,” he said.

“We are not a part of the investigation, but from our understanding of things, it appears that an explosive device went off inside the plane,” Ya’alon added.

An unnamed US official and diplomatic source told CNN that Jerusalem handed over information about the blast to the US and the UK.

One US official told the news outlet he was “99.9% certain” the plane had been bombed, while another said it was “likely,” CNN reported Sunday.

Ya’alon was the first high-ranking Israeli official to comment on the findings of the news report.

Islamic State extremists claimed they brought down the Metrojet flight, without offering proof, saying it was in retaliation for Moscow’s airstrikes that began a month earlier against fighters in Syria. All 224 passengers aboard the flight died in the crash.

‘A group of bullies’

 

Ya’alon also said he still plans to carry out, by November 17, a planned demolition of a West Bank synagogue ruled by the Supreme Court to have been built on private Palestinian land, despite threats of violent opposition from hard-line settlers.

“A group of bullies have taken over a piece of privately owned Palestinian land,” said Ya’alon.

“They want to build another bed-and-breakfast to make some money, and in order to protect the location, they put up a synagogue,” the defense minister claimed.

A previous demolition was pushed off last week after security officials asked for an extension, given threats of violence.

Ya’alon, who also ordered the Civil Administration — the West Bank military organ that operates under his Defense Ministry — to demolish a housing complex in the settlement of Beit El a few months ago, cited that incident as proof that some protesters do not even understand what they are fighting for.

“We had even offered them a replacement building, with 24 housing units. But instead they decided to wage a war, as if it was for the Temple Mount. Unfortunately, the support that these youngsters are getting from politicians, as they throw rocks and bags of urine at security forces, is the seed of destruction that forces us to bend the knee to Jewish terror,” he said.

Education Minister Naftali Bennett and MK Bezalel Smotrich from the nationalist Jewish Home party, and even Absorption Minister Ze’ev Elkin and MK Oren Hazan from Ya’alon’s own Likud party, were among those who have supported demonstrations against settlement demolitions.

“I heard this morning someone recommend that we go in and destroy Nablus,” Ya’alon said.The defense minister would not discuss the current unrest and violence in the West Bank at great length during his briefing, but called for Israelis to keep calm.

“In these discussions, I hear from people who are saying ‘Come on, let’s have at ’em.’ That would be like kicking a wall barefoot — your foot breaks, but the wall remains the same,” he explained.

“We need to allow the Palestinians — the majority of whom are not taking to the streets — to live with dignity and in comfort, but at the same time not allow terrorism to spread,” he said.