One line connects all the stories that will be told here, and it begins and ends in the enforcement system, with its various arms, which does everything to make the citizens of Israel and its police the desire to fight, strive for contact and save lives. No matter how we turn the story of the citizen who shot this week at a terrorist in Be’er Sheva, what excuses are not found for how he was forced to go to the police and deposit his weapon and on the way to absorb threats he will stop if he does not leave the station, Another procedure, the bottom line will remain the same bottom line.
When a citizen shows resourcefulness and courage, and pulls out his gun, and kills a terrorist who has already murdered four people, and at the end of the incident finds the Israeli police behaving like a criminal suspect, it should be clear to everyone, even the commissioner and internal security minister, that this reality is not very encouraging. The next citizen who will encounter the same situation tomorrow is also to do an act.
A few weeks ago, the Police Investigations Department held a hearing before filing an indictment against four police officers, one of whom until recently served as commander of the Temple Mount section, following a letter of suspicion filed in their case. The incident for which DIP seeks to file an indictment against them took place last Jerusalem day, a day that was the opening shot for the Wall Guard incidents. Stones also on Jews who prayed below, in the Western Wall plaza.
The Israeli police, which tried to disperse the rioters, also suffered casualties. According to her reports, 21 policemen were injured during that day around the mosque plaza. This violence has also been well-received around the world, starting with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and ending with the High Monitoring Committee of Israeli Arabs condemning the “invasion of the occupation forces into the al-Aqsa Mosque.” At one point, in the incident we are focusing on here, one of the rioters, Muhammad Titi, took a stone in his hand and threw it forcefully from a short distance at the head of one of the policemen. The stone hit the helmet mirror, which protected the policeman’s face.
Some of the officers, recognizing what was happening, began chasing Titi, who opened on the run, in an attempt to arrest him. Near the Waqf clinic on the mountain, three of them managed to get their hands on it, joined by the commander of the mountain section, Superintendent Yaron Bitton. According to the indictment that DIP seeks to file against the four, and relying on a video documenting the things, one of the officers hit Titi with four punches, while a second officer kicks his lower body, all before his friend was able to handcuff him. , The third policeman beat him two more times.
What punishment did the legislature impose on the charges that DIP wants to charge the three? And since at the end of the incident, the police reported that the suspect was “forcibly arrested,” but did not say “we beat him,” DIP is also interested in accusing them of “disrupting court proceedings,” an offense punishable by three years in prison.
Seven years in prison
Now look, this story can be presented from two sides. On the one hand, it is easy to teach defense about the cops. They are under attack by hundreds of Arabs who throw stones at them at short range. They are in a huge commotion. Explosive sounds in the background. Some of their friends are injured. One of the rioters throws a stone at the face of one of them. Immediately the stone escapes. They chase after him. They catch him. He resists. They exert reasonable force while in custody, and unreasonable force after it, and here we are where we have come.
Life, it turns out, is not a pharmacy, and this incident is very easy to judge severely, when you sit in the air-conditioned and sterile DIP office. It’s one side. There is of course another side. The police are a law enforcement body. And the last ones who are allowed to raise a hand unnecessarily. No citizen of a reformed country wants to see cops beating a suspect, certainly not after they have already managed to arrest him. If so, how is it right to treat them in such a case?
Before you reply, here is the rest of the story. Last October, the court sentenced Muhammad Titi, after it admitted to entering Israel illegally, and on a charge of aggravated assault. Does this section sound familiar to you? Not just. The terrorist who threw a stone at the policeman’s face, and the policeman who kicked him during his arrest, were both charged in the exact same section. The court sailed with loud words about Titi’s actions whose “severity is clear.” The judge explained that “beyond the risk to the policeman’s body, created by the defendant’s actions, they challenge the sovereignty of the state and the rule of law,” and also stressed that “the risk created by the defendant is not abstract, as the defendant threw the stone at the policeman from a short distance and even hit Bo “, but at the end of the proceedings he chose to impose on him only eight months of actual imprisonment.
We will repeat this again to emphasize: the terrorist came out with eight months in prison, with the indictments attributed to police officers reaching a cumulative seven years in prison. In the meantime, until this procedure is decided, the police are on hold. The commander of the Temple Mount, Major General Yaron Bitton, just to understand, has long wanted to advance to the rank of deputy chief of staff, and was even a candidate for this rank when he ran for the position of commander of the Jerusalem District Operations. And he has been transferred to a broad position in his present rank and will have to wait for the completion of this procedure.
It will be clarified that there is no desire here to move to the agenda after an incident in which a police officer raises his hand, even when the complainant against him is a suspect who was arrested a moment earlier for a serious violent offense. And yet, between the possibility of moving to the agenda for such an incident, and the current situation in which DIP seeks to prosecute these police officers for such serious offenses, there is a big gap. What should be done? Find a way to discipline such incidents, which occur during complex operational activities , And not turn cops into serious criminals.Why? Because such criminal treatment, which took place during a difficult operational activity, would be the message that would sit in the cop’s head facing a similar situation in the future and ask himself why he should get involved and whether it’s better to lower his head.
Commissioner Saturn refers to the attack in Be’er Sheva, credit to the police spokeswoman
There is no automatic procedure
And here’s another story like that. About ten days ago, an undercover force from the Border Police arrived in Rahat, with the aim of arresting two Palestinians from the Gaza Strip who are staying in Israel illegally, and are needed for GSS interrogation for security reasons. “B, that there was an exchange of fire, and that at the end of the incident a Border Patrol fighter shot to death one of the three, who he said aimed a gun at him.
The Minister of Internal Security, Amar Bar-Lev, was quick to praise the warrior’s performance. “As reported to me,” he explained to Assaf Lieberman and me in an interview on the B network, “there was a danger to life for the same border fighter. An Arab resident stood in front of him with a pistol drawn with a bullet in his barrel. At the same time, two more gunmen from another angle appeared, and he found himself in a life-threatening situation, so he acted as he should, to the best of my professional understanding, a border fighter … There was no doubt that there was a life-threatening situation here. What are we expecting? “B, who finds himself in the morning in front of a man who turns out in retrospect to be holding an unlicensed weapon, and whose cartridge is loaded, and the whole story is who pulls the trigger first – expecting him to expose his chest and wait?”
Things like spurs, but what? “Despite what the minister describes, a moment after this encounter, DIP took this fighter’s weapon and interrogated him with a warning on suspicion of causing death. “DIP is performed automatically in any event in which an Israeli citizen is injured or killed, this is an automatic action,” he explained. “This practice exists, and I think it is the right practice. It does not matter whether I am comfortable or not, it is an automatic procedure. Many times this procedure is so that after that, if a High Court is filed, then the state can come to the High Court and show that it has done a test. And she did not go over things on the agenda. “
Let’s put things in their place. Contrary to the Minister’s claim, there is no such “automatic procedure”, and there is no procedure by which those who shoot are interrogated with a warning. This week I investigated a series of cases in which police officers shot and killed terrorists, and no one summoned them to DIP and no one thought of investigating them.
An unbearable thought
The issue of these unnecessary investigations, of police officers who carried out their work against a terrorist or other security threat, arose with great fanfare about three months ago. This happened after a terrorist stabbed a young ultra-Orthodox man in the area of the Nablus Gate in Jerusalem, turned on a policeman and a policewoman – and they opened fire at him, and after he fell to the ground they continued to shoot him and killed him.
The entire system, with the exception of the Arab Knesset members who identified in the “execution” incident, responded to the fighters. This is what Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said, who stated that the Border Police acted “as expected of the Israeli police.” , Who ruled that “a second or two after the initial shooting, the police had to make a decision whether the injured terrorist was going to detonate an explosive belt, and when in doubt, there is no doubt,” said Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai. An incident that is happening, and that is exactly what the Border Police fighters did today.
All this did not stop the DIP from investigating the two fighters as suspects in causing the terrorist’s death. Who killed the terrorist in Be’er Sheva. There is a procedure. “This is a standard procedure,” DIP officials briefed the press. “In cases where weapons are used and there are casualties, DIP opens an investigation.”
The next day, the State Attorney’s Office issued an orderly statement: “Where a civilian was killed as a result of police gunfire, DIP is conducting an investigation / investigation procedure depending on the circumstances.” This is a regular and routine procedure, so the existence of the investigation does not call into question the conduct of the police officers in the incident. ” There is no such procedure. DIP personnel exercise their discretion in each case on their own merits. At will, investigators. At will, they give up. In a long line of attacks, in which the police officers shot dead a terrorist, no investigation was opened.
The thought of Minister Bar-Lev, and not only his own, that it is not terrible if a policeman is questioned with a warning, even when no one thinks he has done anything wrong, is an unbearable thought. Just think what happens to a normative person, in this case a border fighter, who risked his life, and finds himself suspected of causing death, and is forced to equip a lawyer, and not sleep at night, knowing that an inaccurate word he says in interrogation could complicate him for life, and all after That his commanders and his minister explain that he performed his duty on the best side.
Beyond that, what message does it convey to the public? What message does this convey to his fellow warriors? Will it increase their motivation to shoot or strive for contact next time, or lower it? For what I have to get involved, each of them will ask themselves. With a hand on heart, this is what a system that wants to encourage its fighters to keep its citizens safe looks like?
But beyond all this, as stated, the words of DIP and the State Attorney’s Office about the procedure that requires them to investigate as a suspect anyone who shoots and kills – there is no grip on reality. Go to the terrorist attacks of recent weeks in Jerusalem, DIP included. Where did the procedure we were told about go? Suddenly there is no automatic instruction that requires investigating every death? Well, that’s exactly the situation. There is no and there was no instruction. There is not and was not any automatic procedure. It all starts and ends at the discretion of DIP people. They decide when it seems right to them to investigate and when not, and everything else is nonsense.
Want another example that shows where this troll of investigations came from? Ten months ago, Moshe Steinmetz revealed here 11 the story of a brave policeman, who arrived in October 2015 at the scene where a terrorist stabbed a civilian – and shot to death a terrorist. The police were so proud of the policeman’s performance that the president awarded him a certificate of appreciation. “Upon arriving at the incident,” the district commander wrote, “the police officer got out of the car, identified the terrorist, fired and neutralized him. In doing so, he prevented a major disaster and demonstrated determination, professionalism and courage.”
Six years passed, and the policeman was surprised when the Police Investigations Department summoned him for questioning, under the direction of the Attorney General, on suspicion of negligently causing the terrorist’s death. Steinmetz’s publication, which presented the absurdity, caused a great stir. Homeland Security Minister Amir Ohana called the police officer to inform him that he was giving him full backing. So did the commander of the Jerusalem district, Superintendent Doron Turgeman. One day passed from the publication, and then the attorney general hurried to announce the closure of the case.
life lesson
Now she returned to a civilian who shot a terrorist in Be’er Sheva and found himself forced to demand at the police station that they not take his weapon, and that he not be left, even for one night, exposed to revenge. First, the claim that this is an accepted procedure, in which any weapon that causes death is taken for a ballistic examination, is a procedure that does not leave the police discretion. Well, as in the claim about the procedure that requires interrogation to warn anyone who shot and killed, this is also a false claim.
The day after the attack in Be’er Sheva, Eitan Rond called me. Rond, a tour guide, emptied a cartridge five years ago of the terrorist who carried out the car bomb attack at the Commissioner’s Palace in Jerusalem. “I do not know what this procedure is talking about,” he told me, “I can only tell you that after I shot the terrorist, the police were not interested in me, and did not take my weapon for any ballistic examination.”
Following his remarks I investigated several cases in which several people shot at terrorists and resulted in their deaths. In all the cases I managed to check, the shooters’ weapons were not taken for inspection. So when it comes to civilians, and so when it comes to cops. What do I want to say? That both DIP when it comes to police officers, and the police, when it comes to civilians, sell us lukes. So that they do not have to stand behind their crooked decisions, these two bodies are covered by excuses for their duty to work according to procedures.
At the end of the day, it is a matter of discretion exercised by DIP and the police, and as much as it is a matter of discretion that led to the shooting of the citizen who fired this week in Be’er Sheva, it is a matter of very crooked judgment.
After all that has been written here, one needs to return to one fundamental point. A citizen who prevents murder, a policeman who rescues civilians, security personnel who fight terrorism, all of these – if they have not repented, God forbid – should know that the public is carrying them on their hands. They need to feel they are on the right side. On the side of the good.
Both the average citizen and the average cop take a lesson in life from everything they see. And when they see that those who shoot at terrorists are taken in for questioning or suspected of causing death, or that “only” their weapons are taken for examination, will that encourage them to do something for the common good when they themselves are caught in a similar incident, or will they go backwards? This is the important question in this affair. From it should be derived the conduct.
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