Israeli forces detained at least 14 Palestinians in predawn military raids across the occupied West Bank on Sunday, in addition to 21 other Palestinians who were detained over the course of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, and the weekend, an Israeli army spokesperson said.

The spokesperson did not provide additional details on the locations of the detention raids.
Severe restrictions on movement for Palestinians are typically implemented by Israeli authorities during Jewish holidays for alleged security purposes. Israeli authorities implemented a “general closure” on the occupied West Bank and besieged Gaza Strip for the holiday, starting Tuesday night and ending Saturday night.

The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society documented 10 detentions carried out in predawn raids Sunday — five Palestinians were detained from Qalqilya, three from Bethlehem, and two, including a former prisoner, from the Hebron area.

Muhammad Ayyad Awad, a local activist in the southern occupied West Bank town of Beit Ummar, reported that Israeli forces stormed Beit Ummar before dawn Sunday morning and arrested 20-year-old Essam Muhammad Issa Bahr, after raiding and searching his family’s house.

Awad noted that Bahr had previously spent more than a year in Israeli prison. Israeli soldiers took him in a military jeep to Israel’s Gush Etzion detention center north of Beit Ummar.

Meanwhile, Palestinian security sources said Saturday evening that Israeli forces detained a Palestinian man, identified as Mamoun Hussein al-Natsheh, in the Tel Rumeida area of the southern occupied West Bank city of Hebron, with Israeli forces claiming the man had a knife in his possession and was planning to stab soldiers.

Earlier Saturday afternoon, eyewitnesses told Ma’an that a young Palestinian man was detained after Israeli police forces rammed into his vehicle and physically assaulted him. According to the witnesses, an Israeli police vehicle forcefully rammed into 20-year-old Zaid Fawaw Hamid’s car near the entrance to the village of Silwad in the central occupied West Bank district of Ramallah, and then proceeded to violently beat him.

Israeli forces were seen preventing local Silwad medics and ambulance crews from approaching the area to treat Hamid, who Israeli soldiers detained for unknown reasons. An Israeli police spokesperson could not be reached for comment.

Israeli raids in Palestinian towns, villages, and refugee camps are a daily occurrence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, with a biweekly average of 85 search and detention raids carried out thus far in 2017, according to UN documentation.

Israeli forces detained 522 Palestinians, including 130 minors and 16 women, over the course of the month of August, according to a joint report released Palestinian institutions focusing on prisoners’ rights.

The total number of Palestinians in Israeli prisons reached 6,300 prisoners, the report said, 64 of them women. Among them are 10 girls under the age of 18 and 300 underage boys, 450 administrative detainees imprisoned without charge or trial, and 12 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, the Palestinian parliament.

[Source: Maan news]