Some 40 adults and 200 children have begun a sit-in at Hevron\'s Gross Square, which marks the border between the Jewish Community\'s Avraham Avinu neighborhood and the Abu Sneineh hills to the south. Rabbi Avinoam Horowitz, who lives in Hevron and heads the nearby Kiryat Arba Yeshiva High School, told Arutz-7 today that the group plans to remain there until the army re-captures the hills from where Palestinians continue to shoot at the Jews below. \"Last night, the group slept here in makeshift tents and wherever else they could,\" Hevron spokesman Noam Arnon said later today, \"but for tonight and tomorrow, we have not yet decided what will be.\"
***As we go to press:
Kol Rina News Agency reports that three women have been arrested, and one - a mother of ten - was evacuated by ambulance after having been beaten by police. A Hevron Jewish Community statement said, \"We protest the police brutality. We are shot at by terrorists from one side, and being beaten by brutal police from the other. We demand that Public Security Minister Uzi Landau order a change in police policy here immediately.\"
\"True, it\'s dangerous here,\" said Rabbi Horowitz, \"and we are vulnerable to shooting from Abu Sneineh, but it is no more dangerous than in Kfar Saba - where we have heard that the residents were asked not to use the main street, for fear of bombs - and no more dangerous than inside our homes, given that a woman goes to borrow margarine from her neighbor and has a flying bullet pass within 20 centimeters from her head...\" Gross Square is named for Aharon Gross, a yeshiva student who was murdered by Arab terrorists at that spot in 1983.
During a memorial ceremony yesterday in Hevron for 10-month-old Shalhevet Pass, terrorists fired from the Abu Sneineh hills towards the very spot where they murdered Shalhevet only three weeks ago. At that minute, Shlomo Levinger and his wife Yisca, residents of Beit Hadassah, pulled up in front of the entrance to the Avraham Avinu neighborhood courtyard, where both Shlomo\'s parents (Rabbi Moshe and Miriam Levinger) and Yisca\'s parents (Yisrael and Miriam Ze\'ev) live. As Yisca bent over to take out her baby son, a shot was fired and hit their car, passing precisely through the spot where she had been standing only seconds before. The bullet penetrated the car and then hit an adjacent car, in which was sitting another child. The sniper shot twice more, with one of the bullets hitting a cement wall under a bench in the playground. Miraculously, the sniper fire hit no one.
Only ten centimeters separated between another funeral, Heaven forbid, and the happiness which we now feel,\" Shlomo later said. \"I was sure that after that, the army would go up and take over Abu Sneineh - but again, this did not happen. We gathered around afterwards and attempted to go up to the hills ourselves in a way that would not bother the soldiers but which would cause the Arabs of Abu Sneineh to run away - but the army did not let us.\"
***As we go to press:
Kol Rina News Agency reports that three women have been arrested, and one - a mother of ten - was evacuated by ambulance after having been beaten by police. A Hevron Jewish Community statement said, \"We protest the police brutality. We are shot at by terrorists from one side, and being beaten by brutal police from the other. We demand that Public Security Minister Uzi Landau order a change in police policy here immediately.\"
\"True, it\'s dangerous here,\" said Rabbi Horowitz, \"and we are vulnerable to shooting from Abu Sneineh, but it is no more dangerous than in Kfar Saba - where we have heard that the residents were asked not to use the main street, for fear of bombs - and no more dangerous than inside our homes, given that a woman goes to borrow margarine from her neighbor and has a flying bullet pass within 20 centimeters from her head...\" Gross Square is named for Aharon Gross, a yeshiva student who was murdered by Arab terrorists at that spot in 1983.
During a memorial ceremony yesterday in Hevron for 10-month-old Shalhevet Pass, terrorists fired from the Abu Sneineh hills towards the very spot where they murdered Shalhevet only three weeks ago. At that minute, Shlomo Levinger and his wife Yisca, residents of Beit Hadassah, pulled up in front of the entrance to the Avraham Avinu neighborhood courtyard, where both Shlomo\'s parents (Rabbi Moshe and Miriam Levinger) and Yisca\'s parents (Yisrael and Miriam Ze\'ev) live. As Yisca bent over to take out her baby son, a shot was fired and hit their car, passing precisely through the spot where she had been standing only seconds before. The bullet penetrated the car and then hit an adjacent car, in which was sitting another child. The sniper shot twice more, with one of the bullets hitting a cement wall under a bench in the playground. Miraculously, the sniper fire hit no one.
Only ten centimeters separated between another funeral, Heaven forbid, and the happiness which we now feel,\" Shlomo later said. \"I was sure that after that, the army would go up and take over Abu Sneineh - but again, this did not happen. We gathered around afterwards and attempted to go up to the hills ourselves in a way that would not bother the soldiers but which would cause the Arabs of Abu Sneineh to run away - but the army did not let us.\"