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Feb. 24, 2021
When the head of Israel Defense Forces Central Command, Maj. Gen. Tamir Yadai, meets with “hilltop youth,” residents of the Maoz Esther outpost, in order to “create rapprochement and calm things down” in the words of a military representative, he is conducting negotiations with terrorists. Some of these “youth,” who are no longer teenagers, but adults who legally bear criminal responsibility, participated in unruly demonstrations against policemen after one of them, Ahuvia Sandak, was killed in a road accident during a police chase.
His friends, who fled with him by car after apparently throwing stones at Palestinians, are suspected of reckless homicide, endangering human life on a traffic artery for nationalist reasons, throwing stones at Palestinians and conspiring to commit a crime. These are all clauses that are familiar from indictments filed against Palestinians. The illegal outpost had been declared a closed military area and was supposed to be demolished two days before the accident. The words “supposed to be” would have been superfluous had it been a Palestinian village that was there.