Testimony: Soldiers beat Palestinian at Nablus checkpoint

[Englander]

Last update - 07:11 07/10/2005

By Amira Hass, Haaretz Correspondent

Four Israel Defense Forces soldiers severely beat a Palestinian man at the Hawara checkpoint south of Nablus on Tuesday while their female colleagues egged them on, according to a Machsom Watch activist who witnessed the incident.

Median Amran, 28, from the village of Burin, south of Nablus, was seriously injured and had to be hospitalized after four soldiers beat him up for no apparent reason. Only the intervention of an officer stopped the beating, said Dafna Banai, a member of the group of Israeli women who conduct daily observations at military checkpoints.

The IDF spokesman, however, said Amran tried to snatch the gun of one of the soldiers at the checkpoint after refusing to go through the metal detector.

Banai, who was at the checkpoint on Tuesday afternoon, told Haaretz that at about 4:30 P.M., she noticed a young man passing through a turnstile and heading toward a second turnstile. One of the soldiers shouted at him to turn back, but the first iron gate locked and he could not return to the line of people waiting to get out of Nablus.

"The soldiers pounced on him, beat him in the face with a rifle, kicked him. He was not violent, he only tried to escape the beating and ran like a trapped animal in the closed compound between the two turnstiles, with the soldiers kicking and beating him," she said.

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