Palestinians, settlers clash with IDF following murder
ISRAELI security forces met with heavy gunfire and rioting this week when they were preparing to demolish the home of two Palestinian brothers suspected of carrying out the shooting attack in the West Bank last week that killed Yehuda Dimentman and injured two other Israelis.
Dozens of Palestinians also threw stones and explosive devices at security forces, who responded with riot dispersal weapons, the IDF said.
The Ma’an news agency identified the home as that of Ahmed Muhammad Yassin Jaradat, the father of brothers Ghaith and Omar, who are suspected of carrying out the deadly shooting, with help from a number of accomplices. The Shin Bet security service said the suspects were members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group.
The two brothers and four other suspects were arrested during a predawn raid on Sunday in Silat al-Harithiya by the IDF, Shin Bet security service and Israel Police’s Yamam counterterrorism unit.
Two men are believed to have carried out the shooting and the other four are suspected of assisting them.
The Shin Bet said troops also recovered weapons suspected to have been used in last Thursday’s attack.
Terrorists opened fire at the car that Dimentman was travelling in with two other men, killing him and lightly wounding them, as they left the Homesh outpost where he was a yeshiva student. A military official said their car was ambushed from the side of the road.
Homesh is a former settlement that was meant to have been abandoned as part of the 2005 eviction disengagement, but is now the site of the illegally operated yeshiva.
The 25-year-old was a father of a nine-month-old son and lived in the West Bank settlement of Shavei Shomron.
The past few weeks have seen a rise in Palestinian terror attacks, with four taking place in Jerusalem alone, including the deadly shooting of Eliyahu Kay committed by a member of Hamas.
There has also been a noted rise in settler violence toward Palestinians.
Meanwhile, Dimentman’s wife Ettya sent a letter on Monday to Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett urging that Homesh not be demolished, but rather made legal and permitted to flourish.
“Don’t complete what the terrorists didn’t, don’t destroy what we have built at Homesh,” she said.
Her letter came after security forces razed a number of structures on Sunday at Homesh set up in the wake of the deadly terror attack.
On Saturday night, hundreds of settlers broke into the outpost, assaulted the soldiers who were guarding the area and constructed a number of additional structures at the site, the IDF said.
On Sunday morning the Defense Ministry’s Civil Authority, guarded by Israel Police officers, demolished the newly-constructed plywood buildings. A spokesperson for the Civil Administration, which oversees day-to-day management of the West Bank, said that only the structures built over the weekend were destroyed, not the yeshiva building, which was left intact.
However, the yeshiva, which has been tacitly operating for 15 years, was also constructed without the proper permits and was built on a site that it is illegal for Israelis to visit under the 2005 law behind the Disengagement, when Israel pulled out unilaterally from the Gaza Strip and four northern West Bank settlements.
Addressing Bennett, Ettya wrote that she heard with “shock and horror” of the plans to destroy the yeshiva. There has been no recent public declaration by authorities to do so.
Instead of mourning for her husband, “I have to stop everything and write to you”. Destruction of the yeshiva will be “another painful injury on top of my husband’s murder”.
“Don’t kill my life’s work, that of Yehuda and our friends at Homesh.”
The letter was signed in the name of Ettya, Yehuda and the couple’s nine-month-old son.
In response to the Sunday demolitions, the Homesh yeshiva said in a statement that “Yehudah’s blood has not yet been absorbed by the ground and already security forces are sent with the purpose of destroying the place and the structures set up in his memory”.
The removal of the structures, the statement said, “is a prize for terrorism” and charged that “the Israeli government is doing” what the terrorists did not manage to achieve.
Speaking at Dimentman’s funeral, the head of his yeshiva, Rabbi Elishama Cohen, called him “a soldier of the Torah,” while adding that “Homesh will say loudly and clearly that this place is fully ours”.
The head of the far-right Religious Zionism party, Bezalel Smotrich, said he believed God “sent Yehuda to us to instruct us to return to Homesh, to build the yeshiva, to strengthen Torah at Homesh”.
Paying tribute to Dimentman, one of the other passengers in the car that was attacked, Aviah Entman, told reporters from hospital, “He was my friend. He was a really good guy. He was a very sweet person and was welcoming to everyone who wanted to speak with him. We got to talk a lot.
“He was fun to have as a friend. We didn’t have any fear of a shooting. We didn’t think it could happen. It’s hard for me to believe he’s no longer with us.
“Just in our last conversation today he came to me all happy and said, ‘Today I won something.’ I asked him what happened and he told me his wife had asked him to take care of his child for a while. He said he was happy he would be with the child.”
Times of Israel
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