Israeli police are seeking to keep a well-known Palestinian journalist in detention in Jerusalem on charges related to “incitement” and “support of terrorism,” despite an Israeli judge ordering her release on Monday.
Latifeh Abdellatif is a freelance photojournalist whose work has appeared in Reuters, ABC News, BBC, Al Jazeera and TRT, according to her Instagram account biography.
Israeli police said that she was apprehended at her home in the Old City on Sunday by Jerusalem District Police officers “on suspicion of incitement and support for terrorism.”
Abdellatif appeared via video link at a magistrates’ court in Jerusalem on Monday, where a judge denied a police request to detain her for an additional five days in order to continue interrogations and investigation. At one point during the hearing, Abdellatif smiled and made a heart-shaped gesture with her hands.
“The court found that based on her work as a journalist and based on the defense that these posts are part of her professional work, and that the posts are more than six months old, there is no need for keeping her in detention and she doesn’t create a danger to the public,” Abdellatif’s lawyer Nasser Odeh told CNN after the hearing.
Odeh said the judge ordered Abdellatif’s release “under restrictive conditions.”
He said this included 2,000 Israeli shekels ($550) to be paid for bail and another 10,000 shekels as a guarantee that she would show up once called in for investigation.
However, Israeli police immediately appealed the decision, seeking to stop her release.
“The police have requested to freeze the decision of the release until they submit an appeal with the central court. Right now, the release decision has been frozen until the appeal process goes into effect,” the lawyer said.
Odeh told CNN that Abdellatif had been interrogated for three hours on Sunday “about social media posts that are part of her professional work as a journalist.”
