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Friday 3 June 2016

Jailed for calling the Palestinian Authority rotten

Electronic Intifada

Kifah Quzmar was at a café in downtown Ramallah when a few men followed him to the toilet. After grabbing him, they dragged him out to a car with a yellow Israeli license plate.

The men, it soon transpired, were undercover police working for the Palestinian Authority. They apprehended Quzmar at the West Bank café on 11 May because of comments he had made on Facebook.

Following the arrest of his friend Seif al-Idrissi by PA forces in April, Kifah wrote on the social media website: “Do you know why the mukhabarat [PA intelligence service] is a rotten agency? Because the entire PA is rotten.”

According to his brother, Anan, this is not the first time that Kifah had been arrested because of something he wrote on Facebook. “They interrogated him a couple of years ago for a joke mocking the PA which he wrote during a snowstorm,” Anan said.

Kifah was released on bail one week after his arrest this month. His lawyer, Anas al-Barghouti, said Kifah could face charges of insulting the PA. No charges have yet been issued.

Kifah is a business student at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank. He is also a member of the Democratic Progressive Student Pole, the largest left-wing organization in the university.

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