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Can the Shin Bet stop hilltop youths' march to Armageddon?

Shin Bet sources admit that they have little means to tamp down the young extremist settlers known as hilltop youth, who carry out violent attacks against Palestinians in the hopes of sparking a conflagration.

Jewish settlers stand at an observation point overlooking the West Bank village of Duma, near Yishuv Hadaat, an unauthorised Jewish settler outpost January 5, 2016. Steeped in messianic Jewish mysticism and rebelling against what they see as adulterated modern Zionism, the "Hilltop Youth," a new generation of ultra-religious settlers whose resentment of the secular Israeli state rivals their hostility toward Arabs, number in the hundreds, by most accounts. But they pose a deep-rooted challenge even for the
Jewish settlers stand at a point overlooking the West Bank village of Duma, near Yishuv Hadaat, a Jewish settler outpost, Jan. 5, 2016. — REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

On Jan. 24, Israel filed a charge of manslaughter against a student from the Pri HaAretz yeshiva in the West Bank settlement of Rehelim. The indictment states that on Oct. 12, 2018, the 16-year-old threw a heavy rock at a car driven by a Palestinian family on Highway 60 between the Rehelim and Tapuah intersections. The rock killed Aisha Rabi, a mother of eight.

The investigation into the incident by the Shin Bet and the Nationalist Crimes Unit of the Israel Police lasted more than three months. At the investigation's launch, leaders of the settler movement deemed it a witch hunt and began one of their own with the backing of members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. They leveled harsh criticism against the Shin Bet and police, with claims that they had employed brutal tactics against the suspects, who were all minors. No means were considered out of bounds, they said, even alleging that the suspects had been prevented from meeting with their attorneys.

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