The Jerusalem Magistrates Court rejected a request by the police on Wednesday morning, asking to distance three minor girls from the Old City after they were suspected of "price tag" vandalism.
The three girls were arrested Tuesday night by Jerusalem police over suspicions that they had vandalized a Muslim cemetery adjacent to the eastern wall of the Old City.
According to the suspicions, the three supposedly wrote "price tag" on graves using rocks and sand.
Judge Dorit Feinstein expressed her shock that the police "wasted public funds" by bringing minor girls to court over an alleged crime of this type.
Feinstein agreed to order the three to be distanced from the Muslim cemetery for 30 days, but refused to impose on them conditions such as signing guarantees or comprehensive distancing orders.
Attorney Itamar Ben-Gvir, who represented the girls on behalf of the Honenu legal aid organization, told Arutz Sheva "this is the result when the Israeli police arrest girls playing with sand."
"Instead of catching all the criminals who defile graves on the Mount of Olives on a daily basis, the police focus their energies on these girls, and the result is that the police fail time after time," added Ben-Gvir.
"Price tag" hysteria - only against Jews
The accusations of police overreaction over "price tagging" bring to mind a case from early March, when a 13-year-old minor girl was detained in a Jerusalem police station for the "crime" of carrying paint she planned to use for her Purim costume.
Meanwhile an Arutz Sheva report in January revealed that in at least some of the cases, anti-Arab "price tags" were being systematically staged by Arab activists.
There have also been numerous incidents of Arab "price tagging," such as the scrawling of Arabic graffiti praising terrorism in February on the Tomb of Elazar Hacohen, the son of Moses's brother Aaron from the Torah, as well as numerous incidents of desecration of Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives. Such cases have received remarkably less public and police attention.