JERUSALEM: An Israeli court yesterday fined Islamic cleric Sheikh Raed Salah $2,600 for obstructing the work of police when they quizzed his wife three years ago, legal documents showed.
Last month, Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court ruled that Salah, an Arab citizen of Israel, had “interrupted” police officers as they questioned his wife at the Allenby border crossing between the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Jordan in April 2011.
Yesterday, the court slapped him with a fine of 9,000 shekels ($2,600), the decision read. The judge said the fine was relatively high for such an offence, partly due to Salah’s refusal to express contrition for his actions. The incident occurred after Salah himself was questioned on his way back from Jordan.
But when a female officer wanted to search his wife, he began yelling and had to be restrained by police, although he broke free and tried to force his way into the room where his wife was. Salah, leader of the radical northern wing of the Islamic Movement in Israel, is no stranger to run-ins with the authorities. In March, he was sentenced to eight months prison for incitement to violence over Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa mosque.
In 2010, he spent five months behind bars for spitting at an Israeli policeman. The Islamic Movement is tolerated in Israel but is under constant surveillance because of its perceived links with the Hamas movement that controls the Gaza Strip, as well as with other Muslim groups worldwide.
Meanwhile, eleven years after the death of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old American activist who was crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer in Gaza in 2003, her family will have their case reheard by three judges in Israel’s supreme court in Jerusalem.
The Corrie family will ask Israel’s highest court tomorrow to overturn a 2012 judgment by a lower court in Haifa, which ruled that the Israeli military was not negligently responsible for Corrie’s death and had fully and credibly investigated the circumstances of her death.
The Haifa court upheld the state’s case that, by entering a conflict area and impeding the work of the bulldozers, Corrie was responsible for her own death.Agencies
