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When four masked Israelis walked up a grassy mound in the Hebron Hills carrying heavy wooden clubs, they did not expect that the Palestinian shepherds also had a weapon. The four shepherds from Yatta were armed with a small video camera they had received from B'tselem, an Israeli human-rights organization.

"When I saw the settlers come, I gave my [niece] the camera and told her, 'Photograph, photograph If they beat us, photograph,' " Tamam Al-Nawaj'ah, 57, said from a hospital bed in Beersheva the day after the attack. Her left eye was purple, swollen and closed, and a bloody gash ran up her left cheek where the bone had been fractured. Her right arm was bruised, broken and bandaged.

Her niece filmed as the settlers approached, but dropped the camera and ran for help after the first blows rained down. Meanwhile, her husband and her aunt were beaten, too. All three were admitted to the hospital.

Israeli police said such attacks are rare, but they could not provide statistics. The reason, said Yesh Din, an Israeli human-rights organization that monitors Israeli law enforcement in the occupied Palestinian territories, is because the police lump Israeli-settler attacks on Palestinians together with Israeli security-force attacks. But, according to a 2006 Yesh Din report on Israeli attacks on Palestinians and their property, it's a daily phenomenon in the West Bank.

Worse, said Lior Yavne, researcher at Yesh Din, "our continuing monitoring of police investigations shows that 90 per cent of the investigations into Israeli civilian offences against Palestinians in the occupied territories fail to reach indictment."

B'tselem has distributed about 100 video cameras in particularly volatile areas where attacks by settlers or soldiers on Palestinians or their property are most frequent. The project, called Shooting Back, was launched in 2007 to help expose Israeli settler and soldier human-rights violations in the territories.

However, without news media coverage and subsequent public pressure, even video footage may not have prompted the police to investigate, said Oren Yakobovich, director of the video department of B'tselem. He said he spoke with the police after they received the shepherds' footage.

"They said it's strong material but it's not enough to arrest anyone because [the attackers] covered their faces," Mr. Yakobovich said.

But a few days later the BBC posted the video footage on its website. "And then, because there was such a media uproar and everyone was talking about it, they started working. After [another] three days they had arrested suspects."

The two Israeli settlers were brought to a Beersheva court last week where they were released on bail and put under house arrest.

"If there was no video and no media coverage I doubt anyone would ever be arrested," Mr. Yakobovich said.

Israel's lack of law enforcement for Palestinian human rights is not new and a string of reports by the Israeli government and non-governmental organizations suggest it's systemic. As early as 1983, a group of Israeli law professors expressed the same concerns as the NGOs do today over the deterioration of the rule of law in the territories. A governmental committee was set up to investigate and, in 1984, the Karp report came to the same conclusions.

It found "serious shortcomings" in police investigations when Palestinians were victims and it criticized the police for failing to seriously investigate charges and for delays in pursuing cases. The committee's chairman resigned when the Likud government failed to act on the report.

Justice is not the only aim of B'tselem's Shooting Back project. It also wants to expose average Israelis to the human-rights violations by Israelis and soldiers in the territories, which are far more numerous yet get little coverage compared with attacks by Palestinians on Israelis.

Last year, a settler in Hebron was videotaped with a B'tselem camera as she harassed and cursed a Palestinian woman while a soldier stood by. The footage was broadcast on Israeli TV and caused an uproar, raising questions - again - about whether the settlers in Hebron should continue to live there.

Mr. Yakobovich said the cameras have succeeded in reducing violence. "In many cases, when the [settlers] throw stones [at Palestinians] or the army starts doing something [illegal] in the area, the moment they see a camera they run away or, in the case of the army, it starts acting according to the law."

That effect is empowering some Palestinians, who have been helpless to defend themselves.

"In many cases, the camera is replacing the stone," Mr. Yakobovich said. "Palestinians are now filming and creating a non-violent resistance."