Israel imprisons Palestinian tour guide

Daoud al-Ghoul stands outside a Palestinian home taken over by Israeli settlers in the Old City of Jerusalem in October 2013.
Ryan Rodrick BeilerActiveStills

Ryan Rodrick Beiler-25 February 2016

Palestinian tour guide and youth organizer Daoud al-Ghoul was sentenced to 18 months in prison last week. An Israeli court convicted him of membership in a prohibited organization.

Sources close to al-Ghoul told The Electronic Intifada that he was accused of being a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist political party banned by Israel.

Al-Ghoul had already spent months in jail before last week’s trial and sentencing. In June last year, he was called in for questioning at the Israeli interrogation center in Jerusalem known as the Russian Compound andsubsequently arrested. That came after a months-long order banning him from Jerusalem, the city of his birth and lifelong residence.

In December 2014, al-Ghoul and four other Jerusalem activists were expelled from Jerusalem for four months. Israel declared that the men were a danger to public security, based on secret evidence which they were prohibited from seeing or disputing.

Israel twice renewed the ban on al-Ghoul’s ability to visit Jerusalem or the West Bank, lengthening the ban to six months.

Secret file

Al-Ghoul likened the orders to administrative detention, Israel’s practice of indefinitely imprisoning Palestinians without charge or trial.

“We don’t have any information,” al-Ghoul told Middle East Eye at the time of his expulsion. “The Israeli police are saying it was a secret file. And in the Israeli file they tell me they are saying that I am a danger to the Israeli state.”

Al-Ghoul also received orders banning him from the rest of the occupied West Bank and prohibiting him from traveling abroad, so he temporarily relocated to Haifa, a city in present-day Israel.

“We are not afraid,” al-Ghoul told The Electronic Intifada soon after receiving the expulsion orders. “We are fighting for our future and we have nothing to lose. We refuse this decision. It is our homeland. It is our basic right to live in our houses in Jerusalem.”

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