The story of branding a Palestinian man with Star of David on the cheek after detention in Israeli Police has raised fury and astonishment among observers and worldwide media.
An unarmed Palestinian citizen who was held by Israeli police in East Jerusalem said he had been physically mistreated after the men beat him mercilessly. The man further claimed that Israeli troops brandished the Star of David on his face.
The man was removed from his home in the Shuafat refugee camp the previous day. His attorney brought the allegations to a district court the following day.
Over 16 cops were engaged in the detention of the Palestinian guy. The report says none of the 16 cops had body cams activated.
According to Ynet, the cops hit the victim with their fists “in all parts of his body” while blindfolding him. The Jewish Star of David emblem was then branded on the guy’s face.
According to an announcement from the Palestinian man’s attorney, what happened was “a grave case of intentional violence and humiliation of a detainee by police” and he called for a prompt police inquiry.
“As a nation that upholds the law, we must not tolerate the problem of police brutality.” According to Shub, there is a strong suspicion that the injuries in this case were racially motivated.
According to an Israeli media, the presiding judge allegedly voiced “horror” at the occurrence and forwarded the case to the law enforcement’s internal inquiry division. The guy “resisted arrest, violently attacked and kicked police who responded with ‘reasonable force’ to subdue him,” according to the police authorities.
According to various sources, the Palestinian guy was seized for purportedly engaging in “drug trafficking offenses.”
The Palestinian Prisoners’ Club is yet to provide a comment or answer the media’s call for intervention.
Star of David; A History of maltreatment
According to statistics provided by the rights organization Addameer, Israel presently detains over five thousand political prisoners, mostly the nationals of Palestine. Over 1000 of them are being kept in administrative detention, a widely despised procedure, without being charged or facing a trial.
In an effort to crush a rising armed resistance, Israeli soldiers regularly launch morning assaults into the West Bank and East Jerusalem, resided by the Palestinians. Armed troops frequently start conflicts with Palestinian locals, detaining and even shooting a large number of residents.
The UN warning that the current year is on course to be the most fatal year for Palestinian people since it began keeping count of fatalities. Over 200 Palestinian nationals have lost their lives in 2023 in the Palestinian territories.
Human rights organizations and Palestinian groups have often charged Israeli soldiers with murdering Palestinians in dubious situations. They assert that Israel refrains from holding its armed forces accountable for their crimes and penalizing them.
Investigations frequently result in light punishments or no penalties. Most frequently, no direct outsiders are even called in for interrogation.
A border policeman who was accused of reckless homicide in the fatal shooting of a Palestinian man was cleared by an Israeli court in July. Suffering from autistic disorder, Eyad al-Hallaq was brutally killed for no clear reason.
The cop, who killed the man back in 2019 in East Jerusalem, was found to be acting in self-defense by the judge. Critics believe that the deadly defensive measure against an autistic person seems irrelevant and find the court ruling guided by bias against Palestinian people.
