On May 29, 2024, Israeli security forces arrested Mahmoud Fatafta, a Palestinian columnist and political commentator, at an Israel Defense Forces checkpoint near the West Bank village of Abu Dis as he was driving with his son to the town of Tarqumiyah, 7.4 miles northwest of Hebron, according to news reports, the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, and the Palestinian press freedom group MADA.
According to the same reports and Fatafta’s brother Hassan, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app, Fatafta’s 10-year-old son was left at the checkpoint until a relative came from Ramallah to pick him up.
Fatafta, who is also a professor of politics and media at the Arab American University in Ramallah and the Palestinian Technical University Khadoury, often appears on TV and radio to comment on the ongoing war in Gaza and regularly contributes columns and commentary to the Wattan Media Network, among other outlets. On the May 15 anniversary of the Nakba, the mass displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Fatafta wrote a column accusing Israel of denying the existence of the Nakba and saying that Palestinians will no longer be victims of weakness and marginalization.
Fatafta also provides commentary on his personal Facebook account, which has nearly 5,000 followers. The last post prior to his arrest included a quote by Egyptian scholar Abdul Wahab al-Mesiri and read “the more brutal the colonizer becomes, the nearer its end is.”
Fatafta’s wife, Rasha, told CPJ via messaging app in November that her husband was charged with incitement over social media posts, but did not specify which ones.
She said that her husband was initially held at a police station in the Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, before he was transferred to Ofer prison in the West Bank. CPJ was unable to determine the status of his health in custody.
Fatafta was arrested in the course of Israel’s recent military operations in the region, which began after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. Israel has killed scores of journalists in Gaza as well as six in Lebanon, jailed dozens of Palestinian journalists from the West Bank and Gaza, and destroyed much of the press infrastructure in Gaza, all while preventing the foreign press from entering Gaza.
CPJ emailed the Israel Defense Forces, Israel’s Security Agency, also known as Shin Bet, and the Israeli Prison Service in late 2024 for comment on the cases of imprisoned Palestinian journalists but received no response.