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HEBRON, West Bank (AFP) - As a deterrent against armed Jewish settlers it does not look much. But the video camera has become a frontline defence for ordinary Palestinians living between Hebron and the Jewish settlement of Kyriat Arba in the West Bank.
"I always keep the camera at my side; it's the only thing which prevents the settlers from hurling stones at us or coming into my shop," says Bassam al-Jaabari as he stitches a pair of shoes in his dusty and poorly stocked grocer's shop.
He jerks his head towards a three-storey house that can be seen about 100 metres (yards) away through the grill protecting his store windows.
More than a year ago, several families of Israeli settlers, who claim they had bought the property, moved into the building in the Palestinian district of Al-Ras.
The Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem, immediately provided the four Palestinian families living near to that house with video cameras, as part of its programme "Shooting Back".
"We know from experience what happens as soon as settler move into the heart of Palestinian areas," explains Issa Amro, the B'Tselem official responsible for the volatile Hebron sector in the southern West Bank
"They (the settlers) make the life of the Palestinians impossible. But if their neighbours film them, they think twice before harrassing them," he adds.
Since the start of 2007, B'Tselem has distributed about 100 cameras to Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, especially in the Hebron area where tension with the Jewish settlers is particularly intense.
Some of the videotapes have been broadcast by Israeli and international media, including one in March last year that showed an Israeli woman hurling a stream of insults for several minutes at a Palestinian neighbour in the old town of Hebron.
"The pictures of this woman have been broadcast throughout the world and provoked at lot of reaction. It was then we realised the potential of 'Shooting Back' which was then in a testing phase," recalled Oren Yacokovobish, in charge of the B'Tselem programme.
"The cameras have above all a deterrent effect; they protect Palestinians. They also enable the public to see incidents which otherwise are invisible and whose veracity can always be challenged," he added.
Last Tuesday, two settlers were arrested after being filmed beating up two Palestinian shepherds, an elderly man and his wife, near Hebron. The incident was made public the previous week when the British BBC broadcast video showing young masked settlers apparently attacking the couple with clubs.
"The settlers gave us a 10-minute warning to clear off from the land," Thamam al-Nawaja, 58, told the BBC after spending three days in hospital following the attack.
She said she and her 70-year-old husband stood their ground and that her arm was broken and her left cheek fractured in an ensuing attack.
The spokesman for the Jewish community in Hebron insists the images provided by B'Tselem don't prove anything.
"Today it's very easy to manipulate pictures," claims David Wilber. "The videos don't show what happened a few minutes earlier. Perhaps what was filmed was in response to provocation."
According to him, even if security in Hebron is "very good," many Israelis fear Palestinians who he claimed are often armed.
B'Tselem said it investigated 47 cases of physical assault, gunfire, beating, kicking, or stone-throwing by settlers against Palestinians last year and reported them all to police.
"Based on B'Tselem's experience, the reported incidents are likely a small portion of the cases of settler violence against Palestinians," the group said in its 2007 annual report.
"All law enforcement agencies and judicial authorities demonstrate little interest in uncovering the substantial violence that Israeli civilians commit against Palestinians in the occupied territories," the group said.
Under an agreement with the Palestinian Authority, Israel pulled out of 80 percent of Hebron in 1997, retaining for several hundred settlers an enclave around the Tomb of the Patriarchs. The group lives amid 150,000 Palestinians and is protected by the Israeli army.
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