7% of Israelis who attack Palestinians are charged

Israeli occupation authorities failed to indict Israeli Jewish settlers who attacked Palestinian civilians in occupied West Bank, Israeli rights group Yesh Din revealed yesterday.

In its annual report, Yesh Din said that the Israeli Nationalist Crime Unit, which was established on 2013 to protect Palestinian civilians from nationalist crimes committed by the Israeli Jewish settlers, failed to decrease the crimes of this kind.

“Out of 289 cases of ideologically motivated offenses Yesh Din has tracked between 2013 and 2016, only 20 led to indictments against offenders and 225 cases closed upon completion of the investigation without any indictment,” Yesh Din report said.

Of those, the police failed in the investigation of 183 files. This failure manifests in the incapacity of police investigators to locate offenders or collect evidence in order to put suspects on trial.

The report noted that these “figures are similar to Yesh Din’s figures on the handling of all the investigation it has been tracking since 2005, which is prior to the establishment of the special unit, when only 90 files out of 1,122 investigation files (eight per cent) closed by the end of 2016 led to indictments.”

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Yesh Din said the data it collected and the data of the police “reflect a trend of protracted failure regarding investigations into ideologically motivated offenses committed against Palestinians.”

It added: “The fact that the law enforcement authorities manage to put suspects on trial for nationalist crimes when the victims are not Palestinians demonstrates that these figures are not inevitable, but rather a product of policy.”

“This policy ultimately leads to a realty in which less and less Palestinian victims of crimes by Israeli civilians are willing to file complaints with the Israel Police.”