Transparency & Accountability
Israeli police ask a court to arrest settlers who attacked Qusra
Image credit: Qusra, Nablus governorate — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 · License
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Israeli police went to court on Monday asking for arrest warrants against settlers suspected of taking part in Saturday's attack on the village of Qusra, south of Nablus. It is the first legal step taken against any participant in the weeks of settler violence that have run through the village since 9 August, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported.
Until Monday the tally in this file was condemnations without arrests. The United States ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, called the siege of the village unacceptable on 13 August. Amnesty International described the campaign on 15 August as state-backed.
The army said on 30 August that it found dozens of rioters when it arrived at the scene on Saturday, and announced no detentions. Three weeks of that record now sit behind a single court filing.
What happened on Saturday#
Settlers entered Qusra in the early afternoon of Saturday 29 August and began throwing stones at the home of Louay Adli. Adli, who called the Israeli police as it started, said the crowd around his house grew to sixty or seventy men. He was inside while they took the building.
By Sunday evening no arrests had been announced. The police request filed on Monday names suspects from that attack; the court had not ruled when this was written, and no charges have been published.
The petition behind it#
The filing follows a petition to Israel's High Court of Justice by ten Palestinian residents of Qusra, who argue that settlers attacked the village repeatedly while the army declined to enforce the closure order that covers the outpost above it. That petition put the army's own paperwork at the centre of the case: an order exists, and the village's account is that nobody applied it.
The same weekend, masked settlers beat a Palestinian woman and an NBC News crew filming in the West Bank, and settlers raided the village of Burqa.
Its mayor, Sayel Kanaan, said they broke into a house on the edge of the village and beat a woman and a child inside, and tried to set fire to a tractor, a scrapyard and a sheep pen.
The official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that the soldiers who came arrested Palestinians and not the attackers.
Why the step matters, and what it is not#
A request for warrants is not an arrest, a charge or a conviction, and the record of settler-violence files inside the Israeli system is that most close without one. What changed on Monday is narrower and still real: for the first time in this file, the police have asked a judge for the power to detain named participants in an attack on Qusra.
The three families under siege at Ras al-Ein are still there. Times of Palestine will report the court's answer.
