Settlers seize a British activist; Israel orders him deported

A British activist was taken on Saturday by armed Israeli settlers at Umm al-Khair, a Masafer Yatta village in the occupied West Bank south of Hebron, shut in a shed for about half an hour and then handed over to Israeli police, his lawyer said.

Inbar Shaked Vardi, who represents the activist, Finn Joughin, said her client had joined a protective presence initiative in the village and was trying to stop Palestinian property being damaged when the settlers set on him and held him. Police went on to investigate him after an Israeli settler lodged a complaint accusing him of an indecent act involving a minor, an accusation she rejected outright; the footage that circulated afterwards, she said, shows her client trying to protect the village during the confrontation.

Police asked a court on Sunday to extend his detention, then withdrew the request and ordered him out of the country at once, according to accounts in the Israeli press. To Vardi's knowledge, none of the men who seized him has been questioned. She said the police had chosen to arrest him "despite clear documentation of the assault".

An Israeli solidarity group that works in the South Hebron Hills said settlers had been harassing Palestinians in the area and trying to take cameras and phones from the people filming, and that Joughin was grabbed and dragged off without provocation and without resisting.

The British Foreign Office said its embassy staff in Tel Aviv had taken the case up with Israel and were still trying to establish the facts.

Protective presence work rests on a plain assumption: that a foreign national standing beside a Palestinian household in Masafer Yatta raises the price of attacking it, because what happens will be filmed and because a foreign passport is awkward to ignore. Saturday inverted that. The visitor was the one removed from the hill, first by the settlers and then by the state, on the strength of a complaint made by one of the people who took him. The household he came to stand beside is still there, and so are they.