Four days after the Israel Police announced that "following the publication of serious incitement on social media, a police investigation will be opened, at the request of the Attorney General and the State Attorney" - this evening, the Israel Police Cyber Unit arrested three young men who were involved in publishing extremist messages inciting acts of violence on social media in general and Facebook in particular.
According to a report on the Mako website, the detainees are a 37-year-old man from Arad and two young men, ages 23 and 22, from Mevasseret Zion and Petah Tikva.
The wave of incitement online began after the bodies of the three teenagers, Eyal Yifrach, Gil-Ad Shaar, and Naftali Frankel, were found - and hundreds of thousands called for "revenge." It is suspected that some of those involved set up Facebook pages for this purpose and swept hundreds of thousands of users after them, who participated in calls for action against Arabs.
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A group called "The People of Israel Demands Revenge" garnered more than 30,000 likes in a day. It included extremist calls for hatred of Arabs, including calls like "Hating Arabs is not racism, it's values!"'
Members of the group, including many soldiers, uploaded hundreds of photos, most of which show people holding up leaflets with the slogan in the page title. The group's creators, they claimed, did not intend to encourage violence, but rather so that "someone in the government would see what this group is all about and realize that something needs to be done about it.".
However, many surfers were not satisfied with conveying the message to the government and called for civil violence.
A smaller Facebook group was opened under the name "El Yehud Gang," which claims to replace the Price Tag operations: "They are murdering our brothers. They are raping our sisters. We are tired of being silent. The youth of the hills are over. The settlers are over. The price tag is over. We are the next name: the El Yehud Gang.".
Initially, the police were not in a hurry to open an investigation, even though these were offenses of incitement to murder and racism, but waited until the Attorney General and the State Attorney ordered them to open an investigation immediately.
The three detainees arrested tonight are suspected of inciting violence, racism, and hurting religious feelings.
The two young men were interrogated for hours at Lahav 433's cyber unit, and at the end of their interrogation, they were released under restrictive conditions for 5 days of house arrest and were banned from all internet access. The third suspect will be brought to the Petah Tikva Magistrate's Court this evening for a hearing on extending his detention.
The suspects claimed that they acted out of a storm of emotions and did not really intend to cause murder.
According to Mako, arrests of dozens of additional suspects are likely expected in the coming days.
In recent days, cyber unit investigators have mapped all the most extreme posts and statuses, located their authors, and they will be required to explain their actions during the police investigation. It is estimated that charges will eventually be filed against some of them, in order to deter others from committing similar acts in the future.
