A contingent of Israeli police invaded the Abu Snaina neighborhood in the West Bank city of Hebron on Sunday afternoon, media sources and witnesses said.
A large Israeli police force stormed the neighborhood out of nowhere, witnesses said. Witnesses added that the police force pulled back shortly after grabbing a bicycle from a Palestinian child.
The police alleged that the youth had stolen the bicycle from an Israeli settler – a charge that the child denied. The occupied Hebron city is a southern West Bank area, where approximately 400 Israeli settlers were placed, under the protection of the Israeli government, inthe 1970s – in the middle of a Palestinian urban center that is home to over 250,000 Palestinians.
That small group of settlers is protected by thousands of Israeli soldiers, who refuse to pursue or prosecute the settlers for their daily violent assaults on the Palestinian indigenous population of Hebron.
The settlers in Hebron are reputed to be the most violent and ideological of the 500,000 Israeli settlers who live in the West Bank in violation of international law.
