A gas canister placed by Jews in an Arab store in Hevron exploded last night, lightly injuring six Israeli policemen - or so reported the media. Hevron Jewish Community spokesman Noam Arnon says that the story did not happen quite that way: \"We are not sure exactly who placed what, but the six policemen who were supposedly hurt seemed to be quite fine last night. Then this morning, they suddenly show up at the Kiryat Arba infirmary, complaining that they were \'wounded.\' The doctor offered to check them, but they refused, and instead set off for Jerusalem - informing the press of their trip. At worst, they seem to have some ringing in their ears...\"
In any event, both the Yesha Council and the Hevron Jewish Community condemned the act, calling upon the police to apprehend the \"handful of vandals who are maligning the name of Hevron\'s Jews.\"
This was the third incident in the past week in which Hevron\'s Jews or their sympathizers have been accused of violent behavior against Israeli policemen - and Hevron spokesmen are confident that none of them are true. Last week, Ido Yitzchak of Yitzhar had been widely accused of attempting to stab a policeman during the protests following the murder of Shalhevet Pass. Today, Jerusalem Magistrates Court Justice Orit Ef\'al-Gabbai found that the charges were totally untrue, and that, contrary to the testimony of a policeman, the knife Ido held in his hand was closed during his struggle with police officers.
Despite the false testimony, the police actually requested today to keep Ido under arrest until the end of the proceedings. The judge refused this request, but ordered him released to house arrest on suspicion of having attempted to slash the police van\'s tires. The judge wrote,
\"Without detracting from the disturbances [in which Yitzchak took part in protest of the government\'s refusal to conquer the Abu Sneineh hills as a means of protecting the Jewish residents below from deadly Palestinian sniper fire], they can be taken as an individual incident, and not part of a general phenomenon of Jewish violence against the security forces. This is as opposed, for instance, to the [Arab] rioting and rock-throwing against the security forces that characterized Jerusalem in December 2000...\"