By YAAKOV KATZborder police pal kid 248 88(photo credit: )
The Military Advocate-General's Office has launched five criminal investigations against IDF troops for allegedly beating Palestinians during operations in the southern Hebron Hills.
The investigations were opened after the advocate-general received credible evidence from human rights organization B'Tselem.
The cases all happened in the past month near the village of Ramadin, where Palestinians were using a breach in the security barrier to cross into Israel for work. One of the Palestinians who contacted B'Tselem said he had been subjected to verbal and physical abuse and that soldiers had stolen some of his possessions.
"The soldiers made a lot of trouble for me," said Muhammad Sadek, one of the Palestinians who filed the complaints. "They hit me in the legs and said, 'Keep on walking, you ass!'"
Sarit Michaeli, a spokeswoman for B'Tselem, said that her organization had decided to contact the military advocate-general immediately after receiving a number of complaints from Palestinians who claimed to have been beaten in the same place by the same soldiers.
One Palestinian, she said, had been beaten so badly that he was hospitalized for a week.
"The number of complaints, all about the same place, immediately lit a red light for us," she said.
The IDF confirmed that it had launched criminal investigations into the incidents.
Michaeli said B'Tselem planned to transfer all of the testimonies and evidence it had collected to the Military Advocate-General's Office in the coming days.
On Tuesday night, the Military Police arrested an IDF soldier who allegedly beat the secretary of the Bil'in Regional Council, Muhammad Khatib, during a raid on the village last month.
The complaint was filed to the Military Advocate-General's Office by Yesh Din, which demanded that the incident be investigated. The soldier's remand was extended until next week.
The alleged beating took place shortly after 1:30 a.m. on September 15, when IDF troops raided the home of Abdullah Abu Rahma, coordinator of the Bil'in Popular Committee Against the Wall, in an attempt to arrest him. Abu Rahma was not home, and when Khatib came to the house to check on things, he was severely beaten. He was later evacuated to a hospital in Ramallah for treatment.
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