The head of the Knesset Aliyah, Absorption, and Diaspora Committee accused the police of “apparent” selective enforcement of closed military zone orders in the West Bank during a hearing on Monday, and blasted National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir for ordering the police not to send a representative to the committee to present the relevant facts on the matter.

Gilad Kariv, a Labor MK whose party is now part of The Democrats, also expressed surprise that the Population and Immigration Authority of the Interior Ministry had not taken into account the fact that two Jewish women who were recently deported from Israel for violating a closed military zone order were participating in programs of Zionist organizations and were members of Diaspora Jewish communities.

During the hearing, the attorney for the two women also told the committee of a police document demonstrating that the IDF and police had automatically determined the presence of “left-wing activists” in the area to be “a violation of public order,” leading the police to send forces to the site in the first place.

The hearing was held to review an incident from October, when Rachel Beth Flamholz and Leila Stillman-Utterback, two American-Jewish women who were in Israel on a program organized by the Achvat Amim organization, volunteered through the Rabbis for Human Rights group to help Palestinians harvest their olives in the town of Burin in the West Bank.

The IDF imposed a closed military zone order on the entire town the exact day on which the olive-picking volunteer activity had been scheduled. Flamholz and Stillman-Utterback were part of a group of 11 activists in total who were detained and deported for entering, unwittingly, they maintain, the closed........

© The Times of Israel