The Horror
War crime! Atrocity! Unforgivable abuse of human rights! Palestinian Forced to Fiddle at Roadblock.
JERUSALEM - Israeli troops forced a Palestinian man to play his violin in order to pass through a roadblock near the West Bank city of Nablus, human rights activists said Thursday.
An officer made the Palestinian man take out his violin and play for about two minutes as hundreds of other Palestinians waited behind him for their turn to pass, said Horit Herman-Peled, a volunteer for the Israeli rights group Machsom Watch, which monitors soldiers’ conduct at the roadblocks.
The army said the soldiers made him open the case and play the instrument to show there were no explosives hidden inside, but noted the incident was “insensitively dealt with by the soldiers at the roadblock who are faced with a difficult and dangerous reality.”