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Ahram Online
“The Israeli police arrested a prominent Jerusalem Palestinian activist, Mona al-Kurd, a central figure of the movement to publicise the threatened eviction of Palestinians from their homes in the Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood”, her family told AFP on Sunday.
The father of Mona al-Kurd, 23, said “police apprehended my daughter and took her to a police station for questioning, leaving a summons for her twin brother, Muhammad”.
In footage widely shared on social media, Mona al-Kurd was shown handcuffed and taken by officers out of her family’s home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood.
The duo gained more than 180,000 Twitter followers and more than half a million on Instagram for their activism, under the hashtags #SheikhJarrah and #SaveSheikhJarrah, taking their neighbourhood’s plight global.
Their father, dubbed his daughter’s arrest part of “an operation to terrorise the parents, because the voice that emerged from the neighbourhood was thanks to its youth”.
He said his son “Muhammad had been away teaching in Ramallah but was on his way back to cooperate with the police summons”.
The Israeli police did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment.
Under Israeli law, if Jews can prove that their families lived in East Jerusalem before the 1948 Arab-Israeli war which brought about Israel, they can request the return of their property, even if Palestinian families had been living there for decades.
Palestinians whose ancestors became refugees in the 1948 war, have no means to retrieve their homes or land in modern-day Israel.
Israeli right group Ir Amim says up to 1,000 Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah and the nearby Silwan neighbourhoods face displacement.
