7-25-08, 9:30 am

Original source: B'Tselem

The following is a personal account of the events.

On Thursday, 19 June 2008, my friend Khalil Ahmad Khalil and I decided to go to Tel-Aviv at night to visit Ahmad Barghouti, a friend of ours who works at a hotel there, and hang out on the beach together.

We left Jerusalem around 11:00 P.M. When we got there, Ahmad was waiting for us outside the hotel. We went to a restaurant for supper and then walked around. About 1:45 A.M., we were on our way back to the hotel to drop Ahmad off and then go back to Jerusalem. Just before we reached the hotel, I noticed a car behind us. I was driving. The driver of the other car blinked his lights, and I saw it was a police car, a GMC with a siren. I pulled over to the curb and stopped. The car stopped next to me, and one of the people in it asked, “Where are you from?” I told him I was from Jerusalem. He told me to turn off the engine. The car pulled up and stopped in front of me and three SWAT-team policemen got out. They were wearing dark-blue shirts and black pants. They came over to my car. One of them, who was short, light-skinned, with short, gelled hair, told me to give him the car registration and insurance and our ID cards. I gave him the documents. We remained in the car, waiting for them to finish checking.

The same policeman gave the ID cards to one of the other policemen, a tall, dark-skinned and heavyset man, who checked them. My ID card had a few cards inside the flap: a credit card, student card, and a card for the university Xerox machines. He threw the cards at me. I asked him in Hebrew, “Why did you throw them?” He replied, “Shut up.”