10 bochurim remain in custody following a Tuesday evening breach of an IDF commander’s residence by Chareidi demonstrators, after the Ashkelon Magistrate’s Court rejected efforts to secure their release on Wednesday.
The incident unfolded when activists affiliated with Peleg forcibly entered the home of Brig. Gen. Yuval Yamin, head of the IDF’s Military Police. The general’s family was inside the house at the time, though Yamin himself was absent. Police said the rioters breached the yard, caused property damage, and disrupted the neighborhood.
25 suspects were arrested on the scene. By Wednesday afternoon, most had been released, but 10 remain in detention after Judge Yaniv Ben Harush ruled that the evidence justified their continued confinement. The suspects face charges of assaulting a police officer, malicious damage to property, criminal trespass, and unlawful assembly.
In his written ruling, Judge Ben Harush drew a sharp distinction between protected protest and lawlessness. “While every person in a democratic country is granted the right to express his protest on a given issue in public dispute,” he wrote, “the respondents’ behavior exceeded the limits of legitimate protest.” He characterized the breach as “an organized initiative to reach the home of a military police officer and intimidate him,” noting that the intrusion “sowed fear and terror among his family members.”
The judge extended detention by a single day, declining the prosecution’s request for a five-day extension.
Defense attorney Menachem Stauber, representing the detainees, mounted a forceful counterargument in court. He alleged that the Ashkelon police station commander had subjected the arrested men to verbal abuse, calling them “terrorists, worse than terrorists,” and comparing them to Hamas’s Nukhba terrorist unit. Stauber argued that property damage at Yamin’s home resulted from police tactics—officers pushing demonstrators—rather than deliberate destruction by protesters.
Stauber characterized the detention order as fundamentally illegitimate. “When a remand request is born out of an atmosphere of hatred and dehumanization, it constitutes a vengeful arrest rather than a legal one,” he stated. “It is unacceptable for a police officer to pre-designate targets and exploit the nation’s most painful tragedies to justify depriving protesters of their liberty.”
(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)
