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Photo:
Israeli soldiers and settlers a day after hundreds of settlers rampaged through Hawara, burning homes and cars and allegedly killing one man last month. Credit: Moti Milrod Published by Haaretz

Map. Screenshot. Published by Haaretz
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by Hagar Shezaf for Haaretz
Mar 13, 2023

Two settlers from the West Bank outpost of Givat Ronen were arrested on Monday morning on suspicion of involvement in the deadly riot in the village of Hawara last month and transferred to the Shin Bet security service for interrogation.

It was decided that the two would not be allowed to meet with a lawyer until midnight.

Attorneys Adi Keidar and Daniel Shimshilashvili from the right-wing NGO Honenu filed an appeal against the prevention of their meeting, and a hearing on the appeal was set to be held at 2:30 P.M. on Monday.

Last week, two settlers, one of whom is a 17-year-old minor and the other identified as 29-year-old David Chai Hasdai, were placed in administrative detention after being arrested and interrogated for involvement in the Hawara rampage.

Hasdai's detention was reduced by a month on Sunday night, and an Israeli court reduced the detention of the minor to two months instead of four a day later, on Monday.

The minor was initially arrested along with seven other suspects for rioting and released until Defense Minister Yoav Gallant placed him in administrative detention for four months.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir denounced Gallant's initial decision to approve the administrative detention orders, calling the move "antidemocratic."

"Precisely in the days when the heroic [Jewish residents] in Judea and Samaria are suffering from murderous terrorism, the defense minister chooses to issue administrative detention orders against two Jews, one of them a minor, while he chooses a 'containment' policy vis-a-vis the terrorists, and this is regrettable," Ben-Gvir said.

Administrative detention is rarely used against Jews, and has been harshly criticized by the right when it has been employed.
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by Hagar Shezaf
Mar 14, 2023

When Abdullah Odeh saw the rioters approaching the hotel he owns, he knew what was about to happen. This was not the first time settlers had thrown stones at the compound and damaged it, he says, due to its location on the outskirts of Hawara, close to the settlement of Yitzhar.

He saw settlers coming from that direction on that fateful day, February 26, when hundreds of them later ran amok and destroyed scores of houses and cars in the town, located not far from the West Bank city of Nablus. It was 2:30 P.M. that Sunday, about an hour after the terror attack on the main road in Hawara, in which the brothers Hallel and Yigal Yaniv from the nearby settlement of Har Bracha were murdered.

A few hours later reports began to come in about the pogrom in Hawara and in the neighboring village of Burin, where hundreds of settlers set fire to buildings and vehicles, and threw stones at the inhabitants and their homes. This was preceded by urgent calls in settlers’ WhatsApp groups to go out to demonstrate and avenge the brothers’ deaths.

The violent events that erupted that day testify to a failure by the Shin Bet security service, which should have had intelligence of what was expected to happen; a failure by the army, which is the legal sovereign in the West Bank on the ground in those locales and responsible for the inhabitants’ security; and also a failure by the Israel Police, which thus far has not succeeded in gathering evidence concerning those responsible for the rampage, and thus all those who were arrested were eventually released by the court – with the exception of two males (one of them a minor) who were later placed in administrative detention – preventive detention without being formally charged or tried.

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