Both times, the girl was caught in Sa-Nur, one of the four Shomron communities destroyed and closed off by the Sharon government a month ago.
The girl's mother, Ruti, was arrested together with her last week. Ruti described her arrest in stark terms, recounting how she made her way to Sa-Nur with her two toddlers, aged 3 and 5, while two older daughters went separately with a larger group of youths. Ruti and her little ones, together with some older girls, remained in a dark room inside the main building of Sa-Nur, known as the Fortress, while all the others, numbering several dozen, climbed atop the roof.
"At one point," Ruti said, "the soldiers - who at first were quite friendly - started taking them down from the roof. We heard really terrible screams coming from the roof, and girls shouting that they were hurt, etc. My daughter later told me that they had tall ladders, and the soldiers were very roughly shoving them off the roof and onto the ladders, and stepping on them so they couldn't get back up, and pulling them down..."
Ruti said that when the soldiers finally got around to the room in which she and some others were, she refused to allow the soldiers to touch her and the girls, and said she would go by herself. The soldiers agreed, but the arrangement didn't last long, and ended with her being dragged very violently out of the building and onto the waiting bus. "They took my son from me, and later I found him, and then I said I'd go by myself, but they kept on pushing me; I couldn't understand why. I was trying to go the bus, and they were pushing me! On the bus, as well, the violence continued; I saw soldiers beating and stepping on girls, it was terrible. I tried to get to the girls, but they didn't let me. There were only a few boys there, but they looked to be in shock, and did nothing. The girls were infuriated, and started tearing the seats... At the Ariel police station, the girls were again dragged as if they were terrorists..."
Ruti, for her part, was accused of attacking police, vandalizing the bus, neglecting children, and entering a closed military zone. "All these charges, except the last one, were totally ridiculous, of course, but I didn't protest - the whole thing was so absurd. There was this one police officer who was so violent with me; he threw me very forcefully aside, and it still hurts me today [a week later]... It was by now around 6 AM, but he started making all sorts of phone calls, telling people that I wasn't fit to raise my children, that I had holed up in Sa-Nur, and that a foster family had to be found to take my children. The regional council's social worker came and was very nice, and refused to sign - as the police demanded - that I wasn't fit to be a mother."
Ruti recounted in great detail how at one point, the same policeman dragged her very violently away from her children into a yard, threw her down three steps, and left her there for a while. With the help of Rabbi Elyakim Levanon of her hometown of Elon Moreh, the children were taken to a foster family in Elon Moreh, where they remained for only an hour until Ruti's husband picked them up. Ruti herself was brought for trial in Rishon LeTzion, almost a two-hour drive to the south.
At this point, the story took a turn for the better: "The judge refused to give the police what they wanted - continued incarceration - but he did order that I be confined to house arrest for a week... I had to get home by myself from Rishon LeTzion, and I finally arrived home around 11 PM." One of her daughters remains in prison, however, while the second one will be released today.