After interrogation by the Israel Police Nationalist Crime Unit, on the evening of Monday, 18 Adar the couple from Maon detained earlier the same day by police detectives was released.

On Monday a couple residing in the community of Maon was detained in the afternoon. The husband was detained by a large number of security forces, including Yassam Police, who arrived with four police vehicles at the yeshiva in Kiryat Arba at which he studies.

A short while later police detectives and a policewoman came to the couple’s home in the community of Maon to detain the wife. The policemen arrived at the house as the wife was on her way to pick up the children from pre-school so they escorted her to and from the pre-school. After she had brought the children home the police detained her in front of them. The police then left the children in the care of one of her neighbors. Honenu attorney Moriah Sasson went to the police station to give legal counsel to the wife. Neither spouse has a criminal record.

The husband, a yeshiva student who is approximately 25 years old, was interrogated on suspicion of cutting down olive trees in the Southern Hebron Hills region several weeks previously. The wife was interrogated on suspicion of setting an Arab house on fire several months previously.

“I denied absolutely everything,” the husband said. “It was bizarre. They interrogated me for ten minutes without presenting me with anything linking me to the incident.”

His wife described a similar interrogation, during which she denied any connection to the arson incident and was not presented with any evidence linking her to the incident.

Honenu denounces the detention and considers the situation bizarre: “In recent years we have seen more than a few baseless detentions, but a detention as strange as this we had not yet encountered. Do the policemen really think that the mother of two children, who has never been detained and lives a quiet life, would go out in the middle of the night to set an Arab house on fire? In our opinion this is a ridiculous attempt by the Nationalist Crime Unit to apply inappropriate pressure on a couple in an attempt to force them to confess to acts which they did not carry out. Their release after a short interrogation indicates that from the start it was a false detention.”

(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)