Palestinian mother of "martyr" threatened with arrest

The Palestinian mother of a youth involved in a recent wave of violence has vowed to carry on publishing “seditious” content on Facebook, despite receiving threats of arrest.

Soheir al-Halabi, mother of Mohannad al-Halabi, revealed that an Israeli officer had visited her at her home and threatened to arrest her for posting content about an uprising on Facebook.

Mohannad al-Halabi was a law student at the University of Jerusalem and was shot dead by Israeli border police on 3 October last year, after he killed two Israeli men and injured two others.

Halabi told The New Arab: “An Israeli officer visited me and my husband Shafiq al-Halabi at our house near Ramallah on Monday morning, threatening us not to publish anything about the current uprising (‘intifada’) on my Facebook account, as it was considered incitement.

“He asked me to write about anything but the topics considered ‘seditious’ by the occupying forces.”

Many Palestinians consider Halabi to be the first ‘martyr’ which inspired the third ‘intifada’ in Palestine.

Halabi’s attack and subsequent death led to a riot which killed a number of Israeli soldiers in the Bab al-Oued district, near the al-Aqsa mosque. The attack is thought to be the spark which launched dozens of similar stabbing attacks in the last year.

Israeli forces bulldozed Halabi’s home earlier this year, sparking violence in the area, before preventing press and ambulances from reaching the scene.