The father of Saad Dawabsha, who was killed alongside his toddler and his wife when their house was firebombed by Jewish extremists on July 31, weeps near a poster bearing slogans and images of his son and grandson in the West Bank village of Duma yesterday.
Agencies
Duma, West Bank
Relatives of a Palestinian couple killed with their toddler in a July arson attack said yesterday they have no faith in Israeli pledges of justice, despite arrests of Jewish suspects.
Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security service said on Thursday it was holding several young men “suspected of belonging to a Jewish terror organisation and carrying out terror attacks”, including the torching of the Dawabsha family’s home in the occupied West Bank village of Duma.
“I want to hope that this is true,” the child’s grandmother Rahib Zeti, 65, told AFP.
“But even if (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu says he’s caught them, what will they do to them?”
The attack killed 18-month-old Ali Saad Dawabsha on the spot.
His parents Riham and Saad died in hospital later from their burns and his four-year-old brother Ahmed is still being treated.
Graffiti left at the site, witness reports and the proximity of Israeli settlements led suspicions to fall immediately on Jewish extremists.
Mohamed Dawabsha, 68, the children’s grandfather, voiced his distrust of Israeli authorities.
“They are liars,” he said.
He spoke of Monday’s court ruling in the case of the burning alive of a Palestinian teenager last year.
It found two Israelis guilty of kidnapping and murdering Mohamed Abu Khdeir, 16, but deferred a decision on the main suspect, pending psychiatric evaluation.
A poster of Abu Khdeir hung yesterday on the Dawabsha home, still badly damaged and blackened by soot.
Duma residents, like many West Bank villagers, say they live in fear of settlers. They say they are protected neither by Palestinian security, which is only allowed to operate in 40% of the occupied territory, or by Israel, which controls the majority.
Israel’s public security minister said yesterday police were still trying to gather evidence against the arrested Jews, playing down prospects of an imminent trial.
“There are not many investigations that get as high a priority as the investigation into the murders in Duma village,” Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan told Israel’s Army Radio.
But he described the suspects as “very, very difficult” to crack because they had often eluded state surveillance.
“For example, these are not people who go around with mobile telephones. They are people who really live in the hills, disconnected from their close families.”
