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Palestinian Activist Issa Amro: I Was Detained for Documenting Settler Violence
Amro said settlers pointed guns at him and threatened to shoot him before soldiers arrived and handcuffed, blindfolded and detained him for seven hours on Friday
Israeli military for seven hours on Friday for being "a few hundred meters from an illegal outpost" and released overnight, said on Saturday that IDF forces apprehended him for documenting human rights violations.
Amro said that Israeli settlers pointed guns at him and threatened to shoot him before soldiers arrived, handcuffed and blindfolded him, and forced a military dog to bite him in the leg.
Amro is the founder of the Youth Against Settlements group, which has drawn international attention to the violence perpetrated by settlers in Hebron's Old City, the segregationist Israeli regime in the West Bank city and the displacement of Palestinians.
In a video he shared on his Instagram page on Saturday, Amro said that he had received a phone call from a Palestinian family who were "on their land, and their farmhouse outside of Hebron," telling him they had been attacked by Israeli settlers.
Human rights lawyer Michael Sfard said Amro was released after seven hours "incommunicado at a military base" for getting "too close to a settlement."
According to Amro, the soldiers, "instead of protecting the mother and the children, arrested the father, and forced the family to stay in their vehicle without the keys."
Amro then went with other members of the family to check on the mother and children, and the moment they arrived, a settler vehicle approached them, pointed a gun at them and threatened to shoot. Then, the settlers forced them to sit down and forcibly stripped them of their IDs.
When he told them that what they were doing was illegal, they responded, "We are the law." A short while later, IDF soldiers arrived at the scene and reportedly aggressively handcuffed, blindfolded, hit and shoved Amro to the wall, then forced a police dog to bite him in the leg.
Amro said he told the soldiers that he had a metal plate in his arm and that being handcuffed behind his back was painful and dangerous to his shoulder, but that "the soldiers did not care."
He said the soldiers released the other relatives but arrested him; they "threw" him into a military vehicle and drove him to a military base. According to Amro, he was held there for seven hours without food or contact with his lawyer and was not taken to a police station or interrogated.
"The base didn't take me in because they didn't want to document my illegal detention," Amro said. "They kept me there for seven hours without food, without communication with my lawyer, without taking me to the police, without even interrogating me."
"It was a kind of punishment for trying to help a Palestinian family, or for trying to document the human rights violations in this kind of situation," Amro added.