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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (63759)	12/30/2002 11:17:50 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Respond to of 281500

Troops Accused of Shaving Palestinians' Hair Dec 30, 9:20 AM (ET) news.myway.com\|oddlyenough\|12-30-2002::09:24\|reuters.html JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A prominent Israeli human rights group accused Israeli troops Monday of forcibly shaving the heads of two Palestinians in a West Bank barber's shop and called for an army investigation. B'Tselem said four soldiers entered a barber's shop in Hebron early this month and found five Palestinian men apparently violating a military curfew imposed on the city. It said the soldiers beat the men, aged 19 to 24, for an hour. The troops also used three of the men as human shields, firing over their shoulders at Palestinians throwing stones, and sheared the hair off two of them, B'Tselem said. "One of the soldiers inside told me to sit on the (barber's) chair and didn't say why. When I sat down, he picked up an electric razor," a B'Tselem statement quoted Bassem Maswadeh, 24, as saying. "When the soldier put the machine in my hair, I grabbed his hand and asked him what he was doing. He slapped me and told me in Arabic to shut up. The soldier put the machine to my hair forcefully. It hurt. He cut my hair in random lines." All five men were subsequently released, the group said. The army said it was checking the report and had no immediate comment on the incident, which the rights group said took place on Dec. 3. A spokesman for B'Tselem, which often deals with human rights issues in Israeli-occupied territories, said the delay in reporting the incident was due to difficulty investigators had in obtaining and corroborating the Palestinians' testimony. Palestinian complaints of abuse at the hands of Israeli troops have increased since the army reoccupied much of the West Bank in the middle of the year after a spate of suicide bombings and other attacks by Palestinians in their uprising for independence.