The Last 76 Hours….Mohammad Arrested

We returned to Nabi Saleh last Tuesday night, where the mourning for Mustafa continued. Villege men gathered in a hall off the town center, and greeted us warmly. We were then invited to join Mohammad Tamimi and his father for dinner, where I also met Balil Tamimi for the first time. Balil speaks great English and shoots many of the videos posted by the Tamimi Press. Two days later, Mohammad was arrested. He is now being held in Ofer prison, and I just heard a few moments ago that his hearing is scheduled for tomorrow.

On Thursday, we were traveling around the West Bank with Hagit Ofran of Peace Now, when word came that a mosque in Burqa had been vandalized. Burqa is a village near Migron, the “illegal outpost” that is scheduled to be evacuated by the end of March. I had been to Burqa once before in search of the land owners who were involved in the legal case against Migron, and it was very meaningful to be going back there, this time with Hagit.

We arrived in Burqa to be met by village leaders, who escorted us into the mosque. The attackers had set fire to a rug on an upper floor, and had also scrawled graffiti on the walls. A TV truck sat outside the mosque, its generator humming.

While most of the action on the trip involved people we’re following on the Palestinian side, we made important progress on the Israeli side as well. A week ago Sunday, DP Tal Pesses was filming Rabbi Fruman’s Sunday night teaching in Tekoa. I had an interesting meeting with a settler from Amona, and with another settler involved in a joint Israeli-Palestinian agricultural project in Gush Etzion. Another one of the Israeli character’s we’re trying to follow wasn’t that easy to meet with — he was in jail.