Israeli police waged a stiff court battle to prevent the release from custody of two men suspected of killing Qusai Jamal Ma’atan, 19, during a violent clash between settlers and Palestinians outside the Burka Village in the West Bank on Friday evening.
Both men had been arrested "on suspicion of causing the death of a person either intentionally or with indifference, and for other crimes committed with a racial motive,” police told the courts.
Police took Elisha Yered into custody immediately following the Friday night incident along with Yehiel Indore, who is suspected of firing the fatal bullet.
His attorneys — Avichay Hajbi and Nati Rom — called the Friday incident both a “lynch” and “terror attack,” explaining that Indore fatally shot Ma’atan only after he was hit in the head with a stone that fractured his skull.
Indore underwent a four-hour surgery after the attack and has been held in custody in the hospital, while Yered has been imprisoned.
The case of Elisha Yered
Yered and Indore were called to the scene by a Jewish shepherd herding his sheep some 250 meters from the back end of the Burka village in the Binyamin Region of the West Bank around 7 p.m. on Friday.
He asked for help from area settlers including those in the nearby Oz Zion outpost, explaining that he had been attacked by Palestinians.
The incident, which drew an increasing number of Palestinians and settlers, took place for close to two hours before security forces were called to the scene. When they arrived, Ma’atan was already dead and Indore injured.
The court battle began on Tuesday when police sought to keep the suspects in custody, but a Magistrate’s Court ordered their release to house arrest.
Attention initially focused on Yered, because was expected to be freed first after both the Magistrates Court and the District Court upheld a house arrest but said that there was no enough evidence to keep him behind bars.
Public attention has focused in particular on Yered, because he had worked earlier this year as a spokesperson for Otzma Yehudit MK Limor Son Har-Melech.
His release was blocked, however, when the police with the state's support appealed his release to the High Court of Justice, which heard the case on Wednesday morning.
The High Court took the state to task for appealing to it prior to exhausting all options with the lower courts.
The case then returned to the Magistrates Court, which denied the request to keep the men in custody, placing them under house arrest. Police then appealed to the District Court, which debated the matter on Wednesday night.
The court proceedings on Tuesday had centered on evidence gathered by police. The basis of Wednesday’s court hearings was a secret file of intelligence evidence police said it had only received the night before.
The court erred by ordering house arrest at a “time when a complex investigation is underway,” police said warning that Yered in particular could disrupt the investigation if released and inflame area tensions.
Hajbi and Rom have told the court Yered had no connection to the murder and that the state had exploited the situation to hold him by falsely connecting him to the larger security situation in the West Bank.
At the High Court hearing, Yered was brought into the room from prison wearing a green T-shirt, a large crocheted skullcap, and long curled payot of brown hair.
His family came to court to support him, including his grandmother who blew him a kiss, and his young wife who brought their small son in a baby carriage.
She held him up so he could see his father. The family continued from there along with the attorneys to the Magistrates Court with Yered joining virtually.
In that hearing, the suspects’ attorneys, all of whom are from the right-wing legal defense group called Honenu, quizzed police. They asked why the most serious charges had been leveled against their clients. They noted that five Palestinians had also been arrested but not charged with attempted murder.
Police said the Palestinians arrested to date, which had been released with restrictions, were charged with “aggravated intentional damage, throwing stones, participation in a riot.”
The police retorted that the Honenu attorneys were only considering the narrative in which Palestinians had attacked Jews, but the counter-narrative, while they had to consider all perspectives.
“At the end, there is a body and there is someone wounded,” police said.
The Honenu attorneys said they believed that in a situation where Indore suffered a skull injury and was shot in the air after the fact in self-defense, the Palestinians involved should have been accused of “attempted murder.”
Police responded that “the things” the suspects’ attorneys were presenting “were not necessarily reflected in the “evidentiary file with respect to who went were and why.”
One of the Honenu attorneys pressed the police, noting that “isn't it correct that the Arabs didn’t come in peace, they brought batons and threw stones.”
The police responded by stating that “the Jews were also armed and came with face masks.” In addition, the police said, the Jews involved in the incident “took the law into their own hands.”
The police did not present a clear counter-narrative. The left-wing group Yesh Din, which is not a party to the proceedings, however, has issued a short summary of its own investigation into the situation.
Yesh Din that Indore was hit in the head with a stone only after he had shot Ma’atan with an M-16 rifle from a distance of some 160 meters. Settlers in turn have argued that Indore used a handgun and shot at short range.