It took Israeli security forces eight hours to locate Niv Asraf hiding in the environs of the Kiryat Arba settlement on the outskirts of Hebron, and to discover that the missing 22-year-old had staged his kidnapping April 2. His friend, Eran Negauker, a noncommissioned officer in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), falsely reported to the police that, having experienced a malfunction in their car, Asraf had entered the Palestinian village of Beit Anun looking for tools to fix the problem, and never returned.

During the hours Asraf was supposedly “missing,” IDF forces conducted searches throughout Hebron — in the very same neighborhoods where Operation Brother's Keeper had been conducted 10 months prior in search for the three boys, Gil-Ad Shaer, Naftali Frenkel and Eyal Yifrach, who were kidnapped and murdered by a terrorist squad from the Hebron region in June 2014. Asraf was eventually found in a makeshift hideout, armed with canned food and a sleeping bag. At a news conference he later called, Asraf said he was involved in a conflict with criminal elements, and that’s why he had staged the kidnapping.

Journalist Nahum Barnea, of the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, reported in his April 10 column that during the searches in Hebron, the IDF detained a Palestinian who subsequently confessed to the kidnapping in his interrogation by the Shin Bet. The faked disappearance and forced confession again give rise to doubts about the use of so-called necessity interrogations by the Shin Bet, where the security agency is authorized to employ “special measures” in the interrogation of detainees.

It is unclear whether the Palestinian who claimed responsibility for the “kidnapping” of Asraf had indeed been subjected to “necessity interrogation.” However, lawyers specializing in civil rights cases, who represent Palestinians accused of security offenses in military courts, have told Al-Monitor that following the abduction and murder of the three Israeli youths last June, the Shin Bet was granted a sweeping license to conduct interrogations using various pressure methods, which often lead to false confessions obtained under duress.