Israel jails Jewish extremist for 6 months without trial

To date, Israeli authorities have used this measure against Israeli citizens sparingly, but have routinely applied it to Palestinians: Israel is now holding 370 Palestinians in administrative detention.

Additionally arrested and positioned underneath administrative detention for six months have been Evyatar Slonim and 18-year-old Mordechai Meyer, each suspected of involvement in numerous nationalistic crimes however by no means indicted.

Ettinger was arrested “because of his activities in a Jewish extremist organisation”, a spokesman for the Shin Bet domestic security agency said.

On Friday, suspected Jewish extremists torched a West Bank home, an arson attack in which a Palestinian toddler was burned to death and his parents and 4-year-old brother were seriously wounded.

For now, the Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not taken concrete steps.

Official arrested Meir Ettinger on Tuesday, He was not being administrative detention it was only the arrest, for his “involvement in an extremist Jewish organization”.

Ettinger spoke of him in January 2014 with a group of settlers who sought to destroy an olive grove in the Palestinian village of Kusra in the West Bank.

Administrative detention dates from British-mandated Palestine, and Israel normally applies it against Palestinians, allowing them to be held without trial for renewable six-month periods.

In a show of passion rarely seen by Israeli statesmen, he likened Jewish extremists to “weeds threatening the safety of the entire garden”.

Israel says it needs to have the option of detention without trial to prevent further violence in cases where there is insufficient evidence to prosecute, or where going to court would risk exposing the identity of secret informants. His lawyer, Yuval Zemer, told Israel’s Army Radio that authorities arrested his client to appease an Israeli public outraged by the arson attack.

The Palestinians have submitted a request to the worldwide Criminal Court to probe the firebombing and “settler terrorism”, said their foreign ministry in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Nasser Qaws, the director of the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society in al-Quds, said that the Israeli forces detained a number of Palestinian worshipers as they were exiting the compound.

Many fear he represents a diminishing liberalism in Israel, where 52% of teenagers identify as right wing, and among those, 48% condone or say they understand the rationale behind such attacks, according to a poll last month by the Rafi Smith Institute. 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”. The effort to stop price tag attacks has taken on new urgency with the recent fire that killed an 18-month-old Palestinian.

But just a short drive away, settlers who live in the illegal outposts that have sprung up on the hilltops view the attack differently and even doubt Jews could have done it – a reflection of the mutual mistrust and deep tensions in parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Associated Press writer Mohammed Daraghmeh contributed reporting from Ramallah, West Bank.