After deadly attack, Israel arrests extremist in crackdown

Though Palestinians and their supporters are tired about treatment that the Israeli arsonists will get under the justice system, Gilad Erdan, minister of internal security, said on Friday that the case will be given top priority and that all efforts will be exhausted to make sure that the suspects end their lives behind bars.

Israel said Tuesday it was interrogating the suspected head of a Jewish extremist group in the first arrest of an Israeli suspect following last week’s arson attack in the West Bank that killed a Palestinian toddler and wounded his brother and parents.

The extension to Israelis of so-called “administration detention”, a practice commonly applied to Palestinian militant suspects and condemned internationally, laid bare authorities’ frustration at failing to curb Jewish ultra-nationalist attacks.

In a radio interview, the ambassador urged those in charge for the need to speed up investigation into the attack against the Dawabshe family in Nablus, and to prosecute the perpetrators in order to curb such crimes and attacks committed by Israeli settlers against the Palestinian people.

With its focus primarily on preventing Palestinian attacks, Israeli authorities now pledge to direct more resources toward domestic assailants who have been allowed to operate with relative impunity.

According to the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, only 1.9 percent of complaints submitted by Palestinians against Israeli civilian attacks result in a conviction. On Sunday, he spoke of “zero tolerance” for such acts.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “promised that no Palestinian state would be established as long as he remains in office, an election-eve reversal aimed at pulling the embattled leader up from behind in a tight race”, reported media outlets.

Ali’s uncle, Nasser Dawabsheh, called on the Israeli government to protect the Palestinian population in the West Bank in an address to a rally in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square on Saturday night. They embrace violence and reject the rule of law. “We decry it as a terrorist crime”, Netanyahu said afterward. What did he do to the settlers?

Sporadic clashes continued in the West Bank on Sunday, with many raging Palestinians accusing president Mahmoud Abbas’s security forces of failing to provide protection in the face of ongoing settler attacks. But Shlomo Fischer, senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and an expert on radical Jewish extremism, said these new-age messianic attackers “conceive of themselves as having a sort of charismatic-prophetic authority and what authorizes these extreme actions is “the voice of God” within them”.

“I just came from the bedside of four-year old Ahmed Sa’ed [Dawabsha]”, Netanyahu said in a statement.