The Be’er Sheva Magistrate Court held this week a third hearing regarding one of several indictments over a demonstration held in Be’er Sheva against Operation Cast Lead  – the Israeli deadly military operation in Gaza, two years ago.

The demonstration in question was a peaceful and legal protest vigil of students in a public square near the entrance gate to the Ben-Gurion University. After the university’s security department called the police, ten officers and policemen arrived at the scene and illegally ordered the protesters to disperse. Despite the fact that the protesters, Jews and Arabs, began dispersing, the police detained five protesters for questioning (some of them within the university gates and members of Hadash and the Communist Party of Israel), arrested them, and issued hasty indictments against them one day later.

Arrest of protester in Be’er Sheva (photo: Activestills)

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) is representing the protesters. Attorney Dan Yakir, ACRI’s Chief Legal Counsel, has asked the court to cancel the indictments, due to the following claims: The demonstration in question was a legal protest which did not require a special permit; there was no legal cause for the police to disperse the protest and no crime was committed, the prosecution’s decision to deny the right of the accused to a hearing before filing charges “because of the security situation” is illegal; and the Amnesty Law for Disengagement Protesters is a discriminatory law favoring those with a particular political ideology – the extreme right one.

It should also be noted that two of the defendants never received the writ of indictment or a summons to appear before the court hearing, and had only heard about the indictment from other students and from ACRI.

One demonstrator, Ran Tzoref, who participated in a different protest in Be’er Sheva a few days later, was then kept in custody and later released to “town arrest” at his sister’s kibbutz in the Galilee, due to being a “serial demonstrator”. Five more people were arrested in this second demonstration, another legal and nonviolent protest against Operation Cast Lead that was dispersed by 40 police officers due to “not requesting a permit.” ACRI also represented the demonstrators in this case, among them Leah Shakdiel (an educator living in Yerucham), Nir Oren (Executive Director of the organization “Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Families for Peace”), and students from the Ben-Gurion University.

The charges against the other five demonstrators were dropped before the trial. Tzoref was later acquitted by the Be’er Sheva Magistrate Court on the charges relating to the second demonstration in which he participated, and the judge criticized the police for its conduct in dispersing this legal demonstration.