“Tolerance toward terrorists ends today”. In cases where there are no serious injuries, prosecutors invariably seek sentences of no more than three months in jail.
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Israel indicts about 1,000 people a year for stone throwing, Al Jazeera reports.
Still, the Knesset law would only apply to areas west of the “Green Line”, the 1948 Israeli-Jordanian military disengagement line that separates internationally-recognized Israeli territory from the West Bank. “A stone-thrower is a terrorist and only a fitting punishment can serve as a deterrent and just punishment”, Israel’s Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, of the far-right Jewish Home party, said in a statement.
During the protests, stones were regularly thrown at the city’s light railway.
The new law was an amended version of a bill provisionally passed by the Knesset past year under the guidance of Tzipi Livni, Ms Shaked’s predecessor as justice minister. The 34-year-old prisoner, Zamel Abu Shallouf, who is being held in Israeli Eshel prison, has reportedly been subject to deliberate medical negligence and is suffering from various health problems. “Who would the judge put in jail?”, he asked during a heated parliamentary debate.
Those who throw stones at a “policeman or at a police vehicle, with the intent to interfere with the policeman’s performance of his duties or to prevent him from performing them”, can face up to five years in prison.
“You are picking on the person responding to major injustices”, he added. Palestinian activists and officials have condemned the law as “repressive” and “racist”.
Ari Briggs, the spokesman for Regavim, an Israeli right-wing organisation that has mounted the legal pressure to destroy Khirbet Susiya, said its residents are “squatters” who arrived only in recent years and that “for upholding the rule of law, the government has every right to demolish”.
Ali Abunimah, the co-founder of Electronic Intifada, similarly noted that the law disproportionately penalizes Palestinian protesters and demonstrators while disregarding the violations inflicted against them by Israeli security forces.
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The Israeli military says its troops were on a routine patrol in the West Bank when they were attacked by a group of Palestinians hurling rocks in their direction.
