Ali Dar Ali, a reporter for Palestinian Authority-run Palestine TV, was arrested in an early morning raid in his hometown of Burham, north of Ramallah in the West Bank, official PA news site Wafa reported. An Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson claimed Dar Ali was detained for inciting violence against Israeli soldiers "in videos he published of them while they were operating."
Early Tuesday morning, Dar Ali had livestreamed two videos on Facebook of IDF soldiers operating in the al-Amari refugee camp near Ramallah, the Times of Israel noted.
In neither of those videos does Dar Ali explicitly call for violence against the IDF.
Dar Ali is the seventh Palestinian journalist to be arrested by Israeli security forces in the last two weeks. Beginning on July 30, dawn raids saw Israelis forces detain both broadcast journalists at al-Quds TV, which Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman declared a terrorist organization earlier that month, as well as independent journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists noted in an August 7 statement.
"Israel has been relentless in its assault on the Palestinian press," CPJ Middle East and North Africa program coordinator Sherif Mansour said in the August 7 statement. "Declaring a media outlet a terrorist organization set the tone for the country's latest crackdown on Palestinian journalists. We call on Israeli authorities to disclose charges against the seven journalists arrested over the past week or release them and allow them to work freely."
The Palestine Broadcasting Corporation (PBC) also protested Dar Ali's detention. "These measures are intended to silence the Palestinian voice and dim the picture so that it [the Israeli military] can commit its crimes without any noise," said the PBC statement, noting that "such measures will not deter us or stop us from doing our national duty toward our cause."
Other journalists who were detained but have since been released told Wafa that security services brought "volumes of their work" to interrogations in an attempt to justify their detention and imprisonment with anything they had ever said that might be construed as an incitement to violence. Wafa noted that this was a way to intimidate and silence journalists in order to stop them from exposing and documenting Israeli violations in the West Bank and Gaza.
