Jerusalem:Israeli police arrested a Palestinian protest leader in the contested Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem on Sunday, a day after forcefully detaining a prominent Al Jazeera journalist covering the campaign by Jewish settlers to evict dozens of Palestinian families from the area.
The arrest Sunday of Muna al-Kurd, confirmed by phone by her father, Nabil, was the latest move by Israeli police against Palestinian protesters in in one of the most sensitive neighborhoods in Jerusalem.
It came as Givara Budeiri, a veteran correspondent for the Al Jazeera satellite channel who regularly covers the story, was released from a hospital with a broken hand that her boss said she sustained Saturday.
Nabil al-Kurd said Israeli police early Sunday “stormed the house in large numbers and in a barbaric manner,” saying they wanted to arrest Muna, 23, and her 22-year-old brother.
“I was sleeping and I found them in my bedroom,” Nabil al-Kurd said in a telephone interview. While his son was not home, police searched the house and arrested Muna, one of the most widely-known activists resisting the Israeli eviction drive. Video posted on social media, confirmed by Nabil, showed Muna being taken from the home in handcuffs.
“The reason for the arrest is that we say that we will not leave our homes, and they do not want anyone to express his opinion, they do not want anyone to tell the truth,” he said. “They want to silence us.”
Police later confirmed the arrest of a 23-year-old woman for allegedly participating in “public disturbances” in Sheikh Jarrah.
The weekend’s tensions began Saturday as Budeiri, wearing body armor marked “press,” covered a sit-in among activists. Witnesses and the satellite channel said that after the protest was over, Israeli police asked her for press identification. Budeiri offered to call her driver to retrieve it. Police instead surrounded her, pushed her and handcuffed her before dragging her to a border police vehicle with darkened windows.
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Budeiri was held for four hours before she was released and hospitalized with a broken hand, said Walid Omary, the Jerusalem bureau chief for Al Jazeera.
Budeiri, who also suffered bruises on her body, had been reporting regularly from Sheikh Jarrah, Omary said. As part of her release, she is banned from returning to the neighborhood for 15 days, he said.
In video footage posted online, Budeiri can be seen handcuffed and surrounded by paramilitary border police. Clutching her notebook, she is heard shouting, “Don’t touch, enough, enough.”