At least 12 Palestinians were detained last night by Israeli occupation forces, during a wide-scale detention campaign that targeted the occupied Jerusalem neighborhood of al-Issawiya, according to local sources.

Large numbers of police forces broke into the flashpoint neighborhood, raided and searched several homes before detaining 12 civilians, including three brothers from the Ebeid family.

It has been almost six months of unrest in Issawiya. Excessive police brutality and indiscriminate daily raids by Israeli forces with no justification have left residents of the Jerusalem district exhausted, with no end in sight.

Since June, dozens of heavily armed Israeli forces from the Border Guards Police and Riot Police units have entered Issawiya almost every evening, staking out positions around the district under the pretext of security.

According to Amit Gilutz, a spokesman of human rights group B’Tselem, Israeli forces have been “detaining hundreds of residents, including minors, issuing traffic tickets for spurious infractions, serving of house demolition orders, and acts of violence,” Gilutz told Mondoweiss in a statement.