A Slav wetback settler that has just landed in here, has the nerves ordering the natives. Soldiers ordered Hebron resident to remove Palestinian flag Rumpus followed failed attempt by Jewish settler to remove flag from his neighbor’s roof. Israeli soldiers in Hebron told a Palestinian to remove the Palestinian flag flying from his roof and threatened him with arrest if he refused. The soldiers issued the order after a settler had tried to remove the flag himself but got entangled in barbed wire. The incident occurred on Saturday, when a settler came to the house of Shadi Sider, who lives near the city’s Jewish enclave, Beit Hadassah, and climbed onto his roof in an effort to take down the Palestinian flag. Instead, he got tangled in barbed wire and remained stuck there, attracting stares from a small crowd of curious onlookers, until an Israel Defense Forces soldier arrived to extricate him. A few minutes later, several other soldiers and an officer arrived and asked Sider to take down the flag. They said they were acting on orders from brigade headquarters. Tempers quickly flared, and the soldiers threatened to arrest Sider. But then the officer called brigade headquarters to warn that cameras were present, asking, “Do you want me to remove it by force?” About 10 minutes later, the soldiers left, but said they would return with an official order. B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, said that soldiers are obligated first and foremost to protect local Palestinians, as they are a protected population in the West Bank. Therefore, the soldiers had no right to leave Sider to defend himself against a settler trying to invade his home, much less to demand, under threat of arrest, that he remove a flag flying on his home – especially when many Israeli flags are flying nearby without any interference. And they are certainly forbidden to satisfy the whim of a settler who invaded a Palestinian house because he couldn’t bear the sight of a Palestinian flag, it added. The IDF stated that it has no standard policy to remove flags and does not plan to implement such a policy. “This individual initiative will be investigated,” a spokesperson said. haaretz/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.579538
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 10:19:20 +0000