Khalida Jarrar, a Palestinian MP from Ramallah, says she was told she had 24 hours to leave Ramallah.

Reuters/Ramallah

 

Palestinian lawmakers have accused Israel of an anti-democratic crackdown as the Gaza war rages, with dozens of elected officials detained, placed under investigation or restricted in their movements.

Of the 84 MPs elected to the Palestinian parliament from the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 2006, 36 are in Israeli jails, two-thirds of them under what is known as “administrative detention”, where the evidence against them is not disclosed.

The measures are among the harshest ever against elected Palestinians in the occupied territories and come on top of restrictions imposed on Arab-Israelis in the Israeli parliament.

In the latest move, Khalida Jarrar, an MP from Ramallah, the main city in the West Bank, said she was woken up by Israeli troops in the early hours of Wednesday and told she had 24 hours to leave the city and move to Jericho, in the desert.

The military said Jarrar, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - a party with an armed wing that is regarded as a terrorist group by Israel - had been “actively inciting for violent actions against Israel”.

“Even speech has become illegal in their ad hoc and contrived legal system,” said Mona Mansour, a Palestinian MP from the northern city of Nablus and one of the few elected Hamas officials not in prison.

“Politicians have no role in military activity,” she said. “What (the Israelis) are doing violates Palestinians’ right to representation as enshrined in international law.”

Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, said it should not be a surprise that MPs from Hamas and other groups were detained since membership of a terrorist organisation fighting Israel would “constitute a violation”.

As well as the detention of parliamentarians in the occupied West Bank, Israel has taken steps against Arab-Israeli members of its own parliament, the Knesset.

Around a fifth of Israel’s 8mn people are Arab-Israeli - Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship - although they have only 12 of the 120 seats in parliament.

Three of those Arab-Israeli MPs are under investigation for having visited Qatar this week, a trip the Knesset’s ethics committee said was not authorised.

Gaza filmmakers win award at Sarajevo fest

Reuters/Sarajevo

Two Gaza directors won an award at Sarajevo’s film festival, though the conflict raging in their home stopped one of them from coming to receive his part of the prize, said organisers.

Abdel Salam Shehadeh and Ashraf Mashharawi shared a 7,000-pound (8,700-euro) bursary at the event late on Thursday, where British director Ken Loach praised their work and “courage to resist”.

Loach said air strikes had stopped Shehadeh from leaving his home in the southern Gaza border city of Rafah. Mashharawi did attend the festival, which was founded as an act of defiance while Sarajevo was besieged during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

But he said yesterday he would not be able to return to the enclave until violence stopped.

“I can’t go back now because of the bombing and because of the closed border. I have to wait, but I know it is also our duty to come here and bring these voices of victims - they chase you,” he said.

Shehadeh has directed more than 15 documentaries about life in Gaza and beyond, among them The Cane, Debris, Rainbow and The Shadow. Mashharawi has also looked beyond Gaza with works including Slavery in Yemen, and award-winning The Road to Tawerghaa (Libya).

“We need these filmmakers to tell these stories because they are absolutely central to our understanding of the conflict,” Loach told a late-night ceremony in Sarajevo.

The bursary came from the British-based Katrin Cartlidge Foundation, created in 2002 in memory of the British actress who died that year, aged 41.

 

 

 

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