At 12:30 p.m. on 26 November 2009, Paulette Schroeder and Johann Funk
responded to street vendor’s report that Israeli soldiers had beaten a young Palestinian man as he made his way through the market towards the Ibrahimi mosque. The patrol had been spotted earlier wending its way through the crowd
of last minute shoppers before the Eid al Adha feast. When the CPTers arrived, six soldiers were detaining a young man who was holding his abdomen and crying. His mother and a man held him while an older man spoke with the soldiers.
A crowd of twenty Palestinians gathered. Soon after, two Reuters cameramen and six more soldiers arrived. With the mother and a man supporting the youth, the soldiers escorted him to just inside the gate of the Beit Romano settlement at Bab ib-Baledeyya, where he collapsed. The mother hung on to her son and refused to have him taken through the gate to the army barracks. At this point, about 100 Palestinians had gathered, and the military kept pushing them back while the mother and several men had an animated verbal exchange with some soldiers.
After about ten minutes, the soldiers withdrew into the base and observed the crowd from a guard post. The crowd surged forward and carried the youth across the street but then returned to the concrete blocks at the Beit Romano gate.
The soldiers fired a sound grenade that temporarily dispersed the crowd; it quickly reformed. Five minutes later, the Palestinian ambulance arrived and evacuated the young man to the hospital.
According to four eyewitnesses whom Schroeder and Funk spoke to, soldiers stopped the young man and asked for his identity card. A soldier then pushed him against the wall. When the youth asked, ‘Why do you push me?’ the soldier struck him on the head and abdomen with a rifle butt and kicked him in the groin. His mother intervened, as did an older shopkeeper.
Two days later, when Schroeder visited the young man’s family, he was still dizzy and his stomach still hurt.
