Hagar Shezaf for Haaretz
Laith Awineh, a Palestinian man who was attacked by Israeli cops and IDF told Haaretz that when he regained consciousness after being beaten, he found himself thrown in a landfill far from where he had been.
Earlier this week, Israeli authorities arrested nine suspects, including eight soldiers and police officers, on suspicion of beating and abducting him last August in the West Bank.
‘I couldn’t get up at first,’ Awineh said. ‘Then I stood up and tried to hitch a ride, but people saw that my face and clothes were bloody and refused to take me.’ On Thursday, the remand of a Border Police volunteer suspected in the assault was extended until Monday. The Department of Internal Police Investigations said at the hearing that there are ‘important developments’ in the investigation.
Awineh, 34, from the village of Battir near Bethlehem, worked as an electrician before the assault. In August, he and a group of his friends went to the banks of Wadi Auja in the Jordan Valley, a recreation site for young Palestinians, where they lit a fire and prepared tea and coffee. Awineh said that a car with Border Police markings drove up and several policemen got out and demanded them to put out the fire.
‘We put it out and began collecting our things to go, and then an army jeep arrived, and they demanded that we show our IDs and then confiscated our mobile phones to see what was on them,’ he recalled. He said that policemen and soldiers, some of whom were masked, put him and his friends in a line and commanded them to identify their phones, open them, and show the pictures saved on them.
‘Suddenly, they took me aside, sat me between the army jeep and the Border Police car, and handcuffed me,’ said Awineh. ‘Then a Border Police cop began to beat me.’
He said that that cop kicked him, broke his teeth, and cut his lips and was beaten in his eye with a butt of a gun, and that he was also beaten by a soldier. He said he swallowed blood and was blindfolded. ‘I could not understand what was happening around me, I stopped feeling, and apparently lost consciousness.’
Shortly after the incident, his friends told Haaretz that, at some point, the security forces threw Awineh into the stream and that they also beat him using a thick limb from a nearby tree and an M-16 rifle. They then ordered them to leave the scene, while still detaining Awineh.
Awineh’s friends said they returned a few hours later and found bloodstains and a piece of wood with blood, but he was not there.
When Awineh woke up in a place he describes as a landfill near the Hamra checkpoint, several dozen kilometers north of the Auja stream, he stood up and tried to find someone to help take him to the hospital in Tubas. ‘I only began to realize what was happening around me after three days in hospital,’ he said. He was transferred to the hospital in Beit Jala for further treatment, after which he kept resting and did not work for two months. ‘I returned to work two weeks ago, but I can’t do physical labor like before, because I have fractures in my back and ribs,’ he added.
On Monday, after a months-long joint undercover investigation by the Investigative Military Police and Department of Criminal Police Investigations, nine suspects in the affair were arrested: a civilian, a policeman, three Border Police volunteers, and four soldiers. The arrested civilian is Saar Ofir, from the Elkana settlement, who is a suspect in another open case of theft of munitions on October 7, 2023 and also a suspect in another case of murdering a Palestinian.
The policeman is Tiran Galmody, a friend of Ofir from the Karnei Shomron settlement, who was suspended from the Police Special Reconnaissance Unit for suspected theft of munitions. The two men were arrested on suspicion of kidnapping, aggravated assault, and arms offenses. Their remand was extended to Monday.
On Thursday, Rishon Letzion Magistrate’s Court Judge Yuval Kedar extended the remand of one of the Border Police volunteers, Dvir Oni, to Monday. At the same time, he decided to release to house arrest Michael Wolfowitz, also a Border Police volunteer and lecturer at the Department of Criminology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Kedar ruled that while there is evidence linking Wolfowitz to the acts, it is not possible to disprove his version that he took no active part in them. At the hearing, Attorney Nati Rom of the right-wing legal aid organization Honenu said that Wolfowitz’s childhood friend, MK Sharren Haskel, agreed to supervise him as an alternative to his continued remand.
The third volunteer was released from detention earlier this week, as well as the four soldiers suspected of the assault after the Military Police did not request to extend their remand.