In pictures: Palestinian women join the West Bank anti-riot police

Decked out with helmets, assault boots, batons and shields, the students at the Jericho police school weather a barrage from stone throwers, before rushing to arrest the “troublemakers”.

“There is no difference between the training for men and women for combat abilities and searching cars and houses,” said one of the instructors, Lieutenant Naama Shalalfat. “Law enforcement is not reserved for men.”

The recruits, who are taking classroom lessons to supplement the training exercises, belong to a new all-female anti-riot unit, which will be made up of 220 members and will be deployed across the West Bank when it is operational.

“The idea behind training this unit goes back to 2009, when a women’s demonstration in the streets of Hebron degenerated into acts of vandalism, while the police couldn’t intervene because we live in a conservative society,” said Colonel Ramadan Awad, deputy police chief for the West Bank.

Lieutenant Osama Awda, 28, says he is “training police officers of both sexes in martial arts and self-defence before moving on to law enforcement”.

Only three per cent of the Palestinian police force’s 8,000 members are women, but other branches of the security forces are making tentative steps to boost women’s numbers in their ranks.

This week, a group of 23 women finished their training to join the presidential guard, which protects key figures and carries out special operations.

n 2013 there was a marked rise in violence against women in the Palestinian territories: 27 women were killed, 15 in the West Bank and 12 in the Gaza Strip, compared with 13 killings in the two territories in 2012, the statistics office said, quoting a women’s rights group.

Instructors bark orders to a column of Palestinian women recruited to an anti-riot unit, part of an effort to tackle problems caused by conservative attitudes in the West Bank force. All photos by Abbas Momani / AFP Photo / February 20