On Friday, December 23, 2016, a group of IDF soldiers apprehended a 7-year-old Palestinian boy, Muamen Murad Mahmoud Shteiwi, during the weekly protest in the West Bank village Kafr Qadum. The incident was captured on video by B’Tselem volunteer Abdallah Qadumi.
At midday, around 12:15, a group of protestors – residents of the village and Israeli activists – began marching toward a roadblock on the eastern side of the village. Testimonies collected by B’Tselem indicate that they reached a house on the eastern edge of the village, unaware of the presence of soldiers in the area. At that point, several children kept walking eastward, separately from the rest of the protestors. Shteiwi was one of these children. He described what happened next in the testimony he gave to B’Tselem field researcher Abdulkarim Sadi:
One of the kids threw a stone towards a dirt mound that had a tin sheet on it. As soon as the stone hit the tin, men with masks came out from under it. Because of their masks and black gloves, at first I thought they were protestors. The rest of the kids who were around me ran away.
I realized they were Israeli soldiers, but because I was so surprised and scared, I couldn’t run. One of the masked soldiers knocked me over and grabbed me, and then more masked soldiers gathered around me. I was afraid. I cried and screamed because of how they looked. The soldiers detained me for about ten minutes. They shot at the protestors with me next to them.
The video footage shows the soldiers catching the young child, apparently, solely because he did not escape their stakeout in time, as the other children did. It does not take a lawyer to know that the detention of a seven-year-old child by soldiers, keeping him by their side as they shoot at his friends, is deplorable and utterly unacceptable.
In July 2011, Kafr Qadum residents began weekly protests demanding that the road from their village to the city of Nablus be reopened. The military blocked the road off following expansion of the Kedumim settlement in 2003. Village residents now have to take a bypass road, extending the 15-minute trip to Nablus to 40 minutes. The protests begin in one of the mosques in the village, and usually include a march toward the roadblock that ends with speeches at the site. This frequently involves clashes between the protestors, who throw stones at the soldiers, and the soldiers, who fire rubber-coated metal bullets and tear-gas canisters.
