RAMALLAH, November 15, 2011 (WAFA) – Six Palestinian activists Tuesday boarded an Israeli bus near a West Bank settlement with the purpose of defying Israeli military law that prevents West Bank residents from entering Jerusalem.

The six – five males and one female – said the purpose of their act, which they named Freedom Riders in reference to Black Americans fighting White discrimination against them in the 1960s, was not to get on the bus as much as to expose Israel’s “apartheid” system of segregation between Palestinians and Israelis.

Hwaida Arraf, the only female in the group and one of the organizers, denounced what she described as Israel’s policy of segregation, where Israelis who live in illegal West Bank settlements can freely board buses to Jerusalem while the indigenous Palestinian population cannot.

The group, wanting to expose Israel’s policy of discrimination against West Bank Palestinians, waited at a bus stop outside Psagot settlement, east of Ramallah, which is actually built on Palestinian land that belongs to the Ramallah’s twin city, al-Bireh.

After a while, an Israeli bus came and the six boarded it along with dozens of journalists who were following the story. The bus drove along the highway to a checkpoint outside the northern Jerusalem city limits.

Soldiers at the checkpoint stopped the bus and after seizing the West Bank identity cards of the six activists ordered them to leave the bus.

When they refused, the Israelis on the bus left it and the bus was kept at the checkpoint for one hour before the police ordered the driver to take the bus to an empty parking long nearby where the six activists were forcefully forced off the bus and arrested.

M.S./F.R.