US citizen detained in a Tuqu' raid is freed; relatives stay held
Hussein Jabarin was taken from his family's home near Bethlehem on 12 August and held without charge for four days. He is preparing to fly back to Pennsylvania; the relatives arrested alongside and before him are still in Israeli prisons.
A United States citizen who was detained by Israeli forces during a night raid on his family's home in the village of Tuqu', near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, has been released after four days in custody, his relatives in Philadelphia said. Hussein Jabarin, 46, a Pennsylvania resident and father of two, was among those seized in the raid on 12 August, and he and his brother were freed on 16 August.
The family said it was given almost nothing to go on while he was held: no explanation of why he had been taken and no account of the conditions he was being kept in. A statement issued by his relatives pointed to "deeply concerning conditions surrounding his detention and a troubling lack of communication and transparency". No charge was brought against him at any point in the four days.
The raid did not come out of nowhere. Relatives in Tuqu' have spent months on the receiving end of settler attacks, with livestock and other property taken and live ammunition fired at members of the family, and several of them were already in Israeli custody before this month's arrests.
Pressure in the United States built once the family made the detention public. The Philadelphia chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America asked residents to call their local and state representatives, and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib recorded a video drawing attention to the case and demanding that he be allowed to come home.
His release stopped at him and his brother. Other members of the family from Tuqu' remain in Israeli prisons, and the village is under the same military occupation and the same settler pressure that produced the raid in the first place. He is due to fly home to Pennsylvania; the relatives still held have no comparable route out.
What separated this case from the arrests around it was leverage rather than facts. A second passport, a congressional office willing to say a name out loud and an organised campaign in a foreign city are not available to most of the Palestinians taken in raids of this kind. Thousands are held in Israeli prisons, a large share of them under administrative detention orders that allow custody without charge or trial, and their cases are measured in months rather than days.