Israel detains Palestinian national football player

Israeli authorities on Wednesday extended the detention of a player on the Palestinian women’s national football team after she was summoned for questioning in Jerusalem, Palestinian officials reported.

The Palestinian Football Association (PFA) denounced the prolonged detention of 20-year-old Rand Halawani, who was arrested on Tuesday evening.

In a statement, it said Halawani’s arrest and that of a former national team player was “not an isolated incident, it is part of a well-documented pattern of systematic targeting of Palestinian athletes, which continues without accountability”.

According to the Palestinian governorate for Jerusalem, an Israeli court extended Halawani’s detention until Friday.

Israel’s military also arrested former national football player Natalie Abu Diyeh, a student at Birzeit University, as well as three other young Palestinian women in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday.

The military said in a statement that the four women were suspected of “promoting terrorist activities and additional terrorist-related activities”.

Birzeit University denounced the arrests as part of Israel’s “systematic policies targeting Palestinian education and students’ right to continue their academic journey”.

Bishop Imad Haddad of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, to which Natalie Abu Diyeh belonged, called for her release.

“We are deeply shocked and horrified by this news, as well as by the news that her family does not yet know where she has been taken”, Haddad said in a statement on Tuesday.

According to the Prisoners Club, the main association for prisoners’ rights in the Palestinian territories, 89 Palestinian women are currently in Israeli jails, including three minors and three pregnant women.

The Palestinian Authority-affiliated Prisoners Club announced in late May that more than 9,400 Palestinians were in Israeli jails, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, sometimes called Arab Israelis.