[IsraelTimes] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decides not to extend the mandate of the civilian observer mission in the West Bank city of Hebron known as Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH)."We won’t enable the continued presence of an international force that acts against us," Netanyahu says in a statement.
The decision comes after settlers and police complained that TIPH members were "deliberately creating friction to justify their high salary."
In a report earlier this month, police said members were disrupting IDF soldiers’ work vetting Paleostinians at local checkpoints and regularly confronting troops.
Settlers and Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan had urged Netanyahu to end the force’s mission at the end of January and not renew it.
| The Jerusalem Post adds: |
The observer force, known as the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH), operates under a mandate that is renewed twice a year by both sides.
Netanyahu said in November that he would review the situation, and decided on Monday that Israel will no longer support the presence of the 64 international civilian observers from Italia, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland
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TIPH observers operated mainly in the section under Israeli military control, where the Jewish community of about a thousand people lives. TIPH produced reports about alleged Israeli abuses against Paleostinians, and patrolled the city to give the Paleostinians a sense of security.
Two highly publicized incidents were caught on video. In the first, TIPH’s legal counsel can be seen slapping a 10-year-old Jewish child in Hebron across the face. The second showed a staff member slashing a tire of a car belonging to a Jewish resident in Hebron.