Franco-Palestinian lawyer Salah Hamouri, an activist in the Palestinian cause, was released on Tuesday in Israel after a week of detention, his wife told AFP. " He was released today on conditions, " said Elsa Lefort, referring to the payment of a bond, a " list of people to whom he should not speak for three months " and the need to make himself " available. for possible summons of justice ”.
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France had asked for " clarification " on the reasons for his arrest and declared that everything was being done so that his situation was " resolved as soon as possible ". " We still do not know " what is against him, said his wife, who was herself expelled from Israel in 2016 and has since been banned from staying there. " This is part of the harassment he experiences regularly, " she added.
According to the Israeli Embassy in France, Salah Hamouri, who defends Palestinian prisoners, was arrested " as part of a counterterrorism police operation ". The 35-year-old lawyer was detained from August 2017 to October 2018. The charges against him were then kept confidential, as is generally the case with administrative detentions.
The administrative detention regime, much criticized by human rights defenders, allows Israel to deprive people of their liberty for several months renewable indefinitely without notifying them of the reasons.
Born in Jerusalem to a French mother and a Palestinian father, Salah Hamouri had already been imprisoned between 2005 and 2011, an Israeli court having found him guilty of the assassination of Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, the spiritual leader and founder of the ultra-Orthodox party Shass, who died in 2013.