The Jerusalem Magistrate's Court ruled that the Israel Police must compensate a couple from the city in the amount of 10,000 shekels, following unlawful police activity and a severe invasion of their privacy.
The incident occurred more than three years ago, just one day after the outbreak of the war, when three detectives arrived at the family's home to locate their wanted son.
Although they did not present a lawful entry or arrest warrant, the officers demanded to enter the apartment. When the mother refused, one of the detectives wedged his foot between the door and the frame, preventing it from closing for about twenty minutes, and photographed the interior of the home without permission.
When the father was summoned to the scene, the detectives prevented him from entering his own home without any legal justification. The father, who sought help and called the police hotline, encountered an escalation in approach from the patrol officers who arrived.
One officer suddenly claimed, "I smell illegal drugs," a pretext intended to justify entering the apartment without a warrant. When the father protested, the officer pushed him violently, took his mobile phone to prevent him from documenting the incident, and the forces conducted an extensive search of the cupboards and the refrigerator, where nothing was found. Only at a later stage did the officers present a warrant via a mobile phone.
The judgment unequivocally found that the officers' failure to present the warrant at the relevant time constituted a serious procedural fault, as they initiated operational activity before clarifying the legal authority for it to the residents.
Attorney Menashe Yado of the Honenu organization, who represented the parents in the lawsuit, expressed partial satisfaction with the monetary compensation but criticized the court's lenient wording.
According to him, the ruling should have included much harsher and more severe criticism of what he described as violent, forceful, unprofessional and disrespectful conduct by the officers in the field.