[Video from B’tselem via Ma’an]

Another in the long-running Israeli series, You can’t make this stuff up: “Palestinian girls detained for picking settlers’ cherries.” Four schoolgirls, aged 11 to 15.

Haaretz’s Chaim Levinson reports:

Because Palestinian schoolchildren in the area have been repeatedly harassed by local settlers, soldiers are now supposed to provide an escort in both directions for all students who attend school in the village of a-Tawani, where the girls study. But because the girls left school early on Tuesday after finishing an exam, the soldiers had not yet arrived, and they started home on their own.

When the soldiers finally met up with the girls near Havat Maon, the settlers claimed the girls had eaten cherries from one of the trees and demanded that they be arrested for theft.

I wonder how many cherries the girls ate. (Perhaps as many olive trees as settlers uprooted or burned in the last few months?) There is no bottom.