Ma’oz Esther, security forces overturn car; Video credit: Geulat Tzion
Thursday, June 18, 2020, 12:56 For the second time in two months, security forces have buried the property of Yehuda and Shomron residents in dirt, for no apparent reason. On Monday, June 15, during the destruction at Ma’oz Esther near Kochav HaShahar in the Binyamin region, security forces overturned a functional car belonging to one of the residents and buried it.
Seven weeks previously, in the Kumi Ori neighborhood of Yitzhar, security forces destroyed a house that was constructed of panels which could have been easily dismantled without damage, and then buried the panels. Honenu Attorney Menashe Yado sent a letter to the Public Complaints Department of the Central Command on behalf of the family whose house had been destroyed. The reply which he received from the legal advisor for Yehuda and Shomron, Lieutenant Colonel Lahat Shemesh, did not contain a response to his claim that the damage to the panels had been unjustified.
Buried car, Ma’oz Esther; Photo credit: Courtesy of photographer
In his letter to Lieutenant Colonel Shemesh, Yado wrote: “The question has intensified in light of the fact that on 15.6.20 border police forces buried a vehicle in Ma’oz Esther. Now the question has arisen as to whether or not there is a practice of burying property, because it is difficult to believe that burying property in two separate instances in close proximity time-wise is a coincidence.”
Yado added: “I would like to know if you stand behind this practice as it was carried out in the two evacuations in question, and regard the practice as legal, or do you intend to instruct the forces to cease this conduct.”
Honenu Attorney Menashe Yado: “The violent treatment by law enforcement authorities of hareidim and Yehuda and Shomron residents is a known phenomenon, which reaches new heights every day. Using a tractor to overturn a vehicle is a hate crime in uniform, and it does not appear that there are any restraining factors in the framework of law enforcement authorities. Therefore the limits are being increasingly breached.”