[Video from B’tselem via Ma’an]
Another in the long-running Israeli series, You can’t make this stuff up: “Palestinian girls detained for picking settlers’ cherries.” Four schoolgirls, aged 11 to 15.
Haaretz’s Chaim Levinson reports:
Because Palestinian schoolchildren in the area have been repeatedly harassed by local settlers, soldiers are now supposed to provide an escort in both directions for all students who attend school in the village of a-Tawani, where the girls study. But because the girls left school early on Tuesday after finishing an exam, the soldiers had not yet arrived, and they started home on their own.
When the soldiers finally met up with the girls near Havat Maon, the settlers claimed the girls had eaten cherries from one of the trees and demanded that they be arrested for theft.
I wonder how many cherries the girls ate. (Perhaps as many olive trees as settlers uprooted or burned in the last few months?) There is no bottom.
Thanks for writing about this. I nearly fell off the sofa when I read it this morning.
You are correct– “There is no bottom”. The IOF are willing participants in the illegal settlers’ terrorism.
It is the absurd sense of settler entitlement that REEKS. A few cherries (or so claimed).
It also recalls the arrests of Palestinians returning (1948-ish) to their lands to harvest crops and orchards left during the war, and being arrested or shot as (first: “infiltrators”, later: “terrorists”). (Sing: “All of this land is our land!”)
Now it’s “cherry pickers”. Sounds like an “easy shot” to me.
They are a vicious crowd. They keep destroying orchards, and stealing trees, belonging to Palestinians, and keeps getting away unpunished. The Israeli authorities does nothing, and the IDF looks the other way, yet these three little girls, who plucked cherries from their trees, are DETAINED? Israel’s actions are always punitive, mean, violent, unrelenting, and resembles those that once inflicted meanness on their own.
If plucking cherries by children resulted in detention and questioning, then the price tag attacks, hate crimes, graffiti, fire bombing, tire slashing, and olive trees destroyed and stolen by the settler terrorists, deserves torture and life imprisonment.
No wonder the world dislikes this disgusting rogue nation.
One might be justified in thinking that people like these settler thugs and criminals are capable of genocide.
I believe there are no boundaries for these satanic morons.
These are most probably the same illegal settler scum who burn down Olive trees and write racist diatribe on Mosques.
How dare they pick fruit on stolen land