Israel places second Jewish settler under house arrest for killing Palestinian teen

The Jewish settler who killed 19-year-old Qusai Maatan in the occupied West Bank last week has been placed under house arrest by the Israeli Magistrate’s Court in West Jerusalem. The court rejected a police request for an eight-day extension of Yehiel Indore’s detention and the charge against him has been downgraded from “deliberate or depraved-indifference homicide”.

According to Haaretz, the magistrate justified his decision by stating, “Even if there was reasonable suspicion for Indore’s arrest, and the extension of his first, the second and third detention – it is not enough now to leave him behind bars. The balance has shifted in a way that now justifies releasing Indore to an alternative to detention under restrictive conditions, so the investigation will continue to take place.” One of these restrictions is that the extremist settler is banned from using his mobile phone.

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The decision comes after the Israeli occupation police revealed on Friday during a remand hearing that they no longer suspect a racial motive for Indore’s aggression, but still suspect him of killing Maatan. Two illegal settlers, Indore and Elisha Yared, were arrested following the killing near Burqa village. Yared was placed under house arrest on 8 August. Local Palestinians said that the suspects were part of a group of some 150-200 settlers who threw rocks, torched cars and, when confronted by villagers, shot dead Maatan and wounded several others.

Attacks by illegal Israeli settlers on towns and villages in the occupied West Bank have increased in frequency and ferocity since the occupation state’s most right-wing government came to power late last year. Some attacks have been described as “pogroms” by an international NGO among others, and even an Israeli general. The attack on Burqa in which Maatan was killed was, unusually, described by the US as a “terror attack by Israeli extremist settlers.”

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